Flower:

Pea-like flowers in a dense, erect cluster at the tips of stalks emerging from leaf axils. Flower clusters are round to cylindrical, up to 1 inch wide and to 2 inches tall; stalks are as long as or up to twice as long as the associated leaf. Flowers are about ½ inch long, color ranges from light lavender to blue to pink to nearly white. The calyx holding the flower is light green with white or black spotting from flattened hairs.

Leaves and stems:

Leaves are compound in groups of 13 to 21, up to 3½ inches long by 1¼ inches wide, alternately attached. Leaflets average ½ inch long, are lance-elliptic to oblong, toothless with sparse to dense hairs on both surfaces. Dense multiple stems grow in spreading clusters up to 2 feet across from a single crown.

Fruit:

Fruit is a cylindric to narrowly egg-shaped pod up to ~½ inch (6 to 12 mm) long, covered in appressed hairs with the tail-like remains of the style persisting at the tip.

Notes:

Prairie Milkvetch, formerly Astragalus adsurgens, is a species of dry prairies at cooler latitudes and reaches the eastern edge of its range in Minnesota's western counties. The plant structure of Prairie Milkvetch is similar to Ground Plum (A. crassicarpus), which has more open flower clusters and smaller leaflets. There are 2 varieties of Astragalus laxmannii in North America: var. tananaicus, restricted to parts of Alaska and the Yukon Territory, has calyx lobes .4 to 1 mm long and fruit stalks .7 to 1.8 mm long; var. robustior, present in the rest of its range, has calyx lobes 1.4 to 4.2 mm long and fruit stalks are 0 to .5 mm long.