Chickling-vetch

Lathyrus cicera, commonly known as chickling-vetch or red vetchling, is a slender, hairless annual herb of the Fabaceae family native to the Mediterranean basin and adjacent western Asia. Plants are 20 to 80 centimetres tall, with weak, ascending to scrambling stems that are conspicuously winged along the angles. Leaves are alternate and reduced to a single pair of narrow leaflets 3 to 6 centimetres long and 2 to 8 millimetres wide, prolonged into a branched curling tendril, with narrowly hastate stipules at the base. Solitary, papilionaceous flowers about 1 to 1.5 centimetres long arise from the upper leaf axils on slender peduncles; the standard petal is bright brick-red to crimson with darker veining and the wings and keel are paler. The fruit is a flattened, hairless legume pod 2 to 4 centimetres long, with a narrow dorsal wing and constrictions between the rounded seeds; the seeds are pale brown, mottled, about 4 to 5 millimetres across. Once cultivated as a pulse and fodder crop in Mediterranean Europe, the species is now mainly a weed of cereal fields and dry roadsides. The seed contains a toxic amino acid implicated in the neurological disorder lathyrism, and is dangerous to consume in quantity unless very thoroughly cooked.