Swainsona elegans is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae and is endemic to Western Australia. It is a prostrate or ascending annual with imparipinnate leaves, usually with 7 to 15 egg-shaped or elliptic leaflets, and racemes of up to 15 blue or reddish-purple flowers.
Swainsona elegans is a prostrate or ascending annual plant that typically grows to a height of up to with stems about in diameter. Its leaves are imparipinnate, up to about long with 7 to 15 egg-shaped or elliptic leaflets with the narrower end towards the base, the lower leaflets long and wide. There are variably-shaped stipules more than long at the base of the petiole. The flowers are arranged in racemes mostly of up to 15 on a peduncle long, each flower long. The sepals are joined at the base, forming a tube about long, the sepal lobes about the same length as the tube. The petals are pale blue, dark blue or reddish-purple, the standard petal long and wide, the wings long, and the keel about long and wide. Flowering occurs from July to October, and the fruit is a pod long and wide with the remains of the style about long.[1]
Swainsona elegans was first formally described in 1948 by Alma Theodora Lee in Contributions from the New South Wales National Herbarium, from specimens collected east of Carnarvon in 1937.[2] The specific epithet (elegans) means "fine" or "elegant".[3]
This species of pea grows in damp, often salty and on stony, hilly places in the Avon Wheatbelt, Carnarvon, Gascoyne, Murchison and Yalgoo bioregions of Western Australia.