Vicia villosa

Hairy vetch, winter vetch, Winter Vetch

Family: Fabaceae · Type: annual · Not Native

Hairy vetch is a naturalized annual legume found in disturbed agricultural and ruderal habitats across California. Flowering from April to July, this plant produces blue-purple to lavender flowers in dense clusters along one side of the flower stalk. Growing with sprawling or climbing stems up to one meter long, it has a climbing or spreading habit that allows it to spread across ground or nearby vegetation. Its compound leaves feature 12 to 18 narrowly oblong leaflets, each 1 to 2.5 centimeters long with rounded tips and a single tooth at the end. The fruit is a widely oblong pod 1.5 to 4 centimeters long, characteristic of its legume family.

California counties: Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, Ventura, San Bernardino, Santa Cruz, Fresno, Sonoma, Sacramento, Napa, Tulare, Colusa, Mono, Yolo, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Mendocino, Humboldt, Siskiyou, Shasta, Lake, San Mateo, Tehama, San Joaquin, Tuolumne, Kern, Alameda, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Yuba, El Dorado, Contra Costa, Nevada, Marin, Butte, Glenn, Madera, Lassen, Placer, Calaveras, Solano, Stanislaus, Santa Clara, Sierra, Merced

Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.