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230 LEGUMINOSAE (PULSE FAMILY) 
Range: Throughout eastern North America. : 
Sib ie Meadows, pastures, grain fields, roadsides, and waste 
places. 
Stone Clover usually grows and is able to thrive on very dry, 
sandy, and gravelly soils, and it is a pity that it is not a better 
fodder plant. But its excessive hairiness 
causes cattle to dislike it and even makes 
it dangerous, particularly when eaten by 
horses, as the fuzzy flower-heads some- 
times collect into felt-like, compact masses 
called phytobezoars, or hair-balls, closing 
the intestines and occasionally causing a 
very distressful form of death. 
Stem six inches to a foot high, erect, 
slender, much branched, covered with 
fine, silky, gray hair. Leaves alternate 
palmately three-foliolate, with short peti- 
oles and narrow, awl-shaped stipules; 
leaflets narrowly oblong or wedge-shaped, 
about an inch in length, obtuse or often 
notched at the tips. Flowers in dense, 
nearly cylindrical heads, a half-inch to an 
inch long, on slender, terminal peduncles ; 
Fic. 163. — Rabbit-foot corolla white or pinkish but hidden by 
di (Trifolium arvense). the calyx-lobes; which extend far beyond 
it in five slender, awl-like points, thickly 
fringed with silky gray or pale reddish hairs. Pods very tiny, con- 
taining one or two seeds which are a frequent impurity of other 
claver seeds and of grasses and grain. (Fig. 163.) 
Means of control 
Enrich‘and cultivate the ground, seeding heavily to other and 
better members of the Clover Family. When Stone Clover is 
cured with hay, the danger from hair-balls is averted by cutting 
before the heads are matured. Also such prevention of seed- 
ing will cleanse the ground of the weed, if persistently re- 
peated until all dormant seeds have germinated and been thus 
destroyed. 
