Flora of New Zealand Series

Type: W, 224/588.

Prostrate slender shrub with branches up to 4 dm. or occ. 8 dm. long; branchlets 1-2 mm. wide, compressed, striate, sparsely hairy. Lvs 1-3-foliolate; lflts ± linear, glab. or nearly so. Infl. of short 2-3-fld racemes on pilose peduncles hardly > 3 mm. long. Fls ± 4 × 3 mm., on minute ± pilose pedicels. Calyx c. 2 × 1 mm., glab. or nearly so; teeth minute, blunt. Standard white, with purple basal blotch and purple veins; keel whitish, auricles pointed; wings white, auricles bluntly pointed. Pods 3-4 × 2-3 mm., ovoid, turgid, dark brown to black; beak stout to slender, ± 1 mm. long, stylar portion long-persistent. Seeds yellowish brown, ± heavily black-mottled.

DIST.: S. "Growing as a small colony on a wind-swept sandstone ledge on a small island rising, at low water, out of the mud-flat of Westhaven (West Wanganui). W. H. Field and B. C. Aston!"

The status of this and of C. prona needs further study. Cockayne (loc. cit. 163) had "insufficient material. In many cases the capsules were much damaged". He compares the plant to C. juncea Col., but differing, inter alia, in the "smaller dehiscent pod, with much stouter beak, which contains not 1-3 but 2-5 seeds". Simpson (loc. cit. 285) states that the pod is ind., the seeds "1-3 (2)".

I have not seen fresh material, but the pods appear to be definitely of Huttonella type; the seeds much as described by Simpson, but sts concolorous.