Swainsona elegantoides is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae and is endemic to north-western Western Australia. It is an erect, probably annual plant with imparipinnate leaves, with about 11 narrowly egg-shaped leaflets, and racemes of 15 to 25 purple flowers.
Swainsona elegantoides is an erect, probably annual plant that typically grows to a height of more than with stems about in diameter. Its leaves are imparipinnate, long with about 11 narrowly egg-shaped leaflets, the lower leaflets long and wide. There are variably-shaped stipules up to long at the base of the petiole. The flowers are arranged in racemes mostly of 15 to 25 on a peduncle long, each flower long. The sepals are joined at the base, forming a tube about long, the sepal lobes about twice the length of the tube. The petals are purple, the standard petal long, the wings long, and the keel long and deep. Flowering occurs from July to October, and the fruit is a pod long and wide with the remains of the hooked style about long.[1]
This species was first formally described in 1948 by Alma Theodora Lee who gave it the name Swainsona beasleyana subsp. elegantoides in Contributions from the New South Wales National Herbarium, from specimens collected near Mount Hales near the upper Murchison River by W.A. Crossland in 1884.[2] In 1993, Joy Thompson raised the subspecies to species status in the journal Telopea.[3] The specific epithet (elegantoides) means "like Swainsona elegans".[4]
This species of pea grows among rocks, on flats and on moist floodplains in the Gascoyne, Murchison, Pilbara and Yalgoo bioregions in the north-west of Western Australia.