Oxytropis lapponica

Oxytropis lapponica, the Lapland locoweed or Lapland milkvetch, is a small caespitose perennial herb in the Fabaceae native to arctic and subarctic Eurasia, with disjunct populations through the high mountains of central Europe, the Caucasus, and Siberia, where it grows on calcareous alpine grassland, fellfield, and stable scree. Plants arise from a stout woody taproot and branching caudex, forming low cushions or loose mats of leafy rosettes 5 to 20 centimetres tall. The pinnately compound leaves bear 9 to 21 small, narrowly elliptic to oblong leaflets clothed in silvery appressed hairs. From the axils arise leafless scapes carrying compact terminal racemes of 4 to 12 pea-like flowers; the corolla is violet to bluish purple with a slender, narrow, beaked keel petal characteristic of Oxytropis. The fruit is a small, oblong, finely pubescent legume that splits along both sutures to release several mottled seeds. Like other locoweeds the species sequesters the indolizidine alkaloid swainsonine, derived from a symbiotic fungal endophyte.