Plant Families: Peas!

I could spend weeks and weeks and weeks writing about the Pea Family (Fabaceae); those of you whom have been reading me for the past few years know that. My infatuation with the family didn't start until after my wife and I left Ohio more than five years ago, to embark upon our great midlife adventure in which we travel around the country working as innkeepers (most of the time). While we were always very active nature lovers, bird-watchers, gardeners, stargazers, mushroom gathers, etc., nature was not a conscious part of the original plan. Spring on Lake Michigan changed all that.

Before our great midlife adventure, my experience and knowledge of the Pea Family went no further than the many varieties of peas and beans we grew in the garden. It never crossed my mind that peanuts and lentils and so on were part of the family, and I didn't know that clovers were a part of the family. I knew there were a few pea species in southern Ohio prairies, but I was more focused on Milkweeds at the time. I hadn't seen my first lupine, and we all know what happened once I got to California and the many wonderful lupine species I found there...

The Pea Family is enormous, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 17,000 species spread over about 640 genera. They come in trees, shrubs, herbs, and vines. Leaves are usually compound, either pinnately or palmately, or sometimes simple by way of evolutionary loss of leaflets.

The flowers come in three distinct types, the one most of us are perhaps the most familiar with being the archetypal "pea-like" flowers, which consist of the broad upper banner, the two lateral petals we usually call wings, and the two bottom petals, which are joined, look a bit like the prow of a boat, and are called the keel. (Again, that's banner, wings and keel.) These flowers usually have 9 joined stamens and 1 free stamen surrounding the ovary, and tucked way in the keel.

The other two types of flowers are those of the Acacias genus, which are radially symmetrical and have conspicuous stamens, and the Sennas, which are bilaterally symmetrical, but do not have a distinct banner and keel. Some botanists, with these three types of flowers as the defining characteristic, have broken the Fabaceae Family into three families: Fabaceae, Mimosaceae, and Caesalpiniaceae.

As wildflowers go, which are, in some cases considered weeds, there are many species we know, even if we don't know they are members of the Pea Family. There are so many in fact, they are best left for my next Plant Families installment. Pretty suspenseful, huh?

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