Yellow serradella

Ornithopus compressus is a low-growing softly hairy annual herb of the Fabaceae family forming sprawling tufts 10-40 cm tall with slender wiry stems that are erect to decumbent and somewhat branched at the base. The whole plant is finely clothed with short spreading hairs. Leaves are alternate, imparipinnate, 3-10 cm long, with 9-25 small obovate to oblong leaflets 4-10 mm long; stipules are small, lanceolate and inconspicuous. The inflorescence is a small dense head-like cluster of three to seven flowers borne on slender, often crook-tipped peduncles arising from the upper leaf axils and subtended by a conspicuous leafy bract resembling the cauline leaves. Each flower is a small pea-flower 5-8 mm long with a tubular calyx of five subequal teeth and a pale yellow corolla often veined or shaded with reddish-brown on the standard. The fruit is a slender, strongly constricted, somewhat curved loment 2-5 cm long that is laterally compressed and divides crosswise at maturity into four to eight one-seeded joints; the indehiscent joints resemble small bird's feet (the genus name Ornithopus means 'bird-foot'). Native to dry, sandy, often acidic open ground throughout the Mediterranean basin and adjacent Atlantic Europe and North Africa.