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This low, sprawling native perennial produces small clusters of yellow, pea-like flowers from May to September, often streaked with orange or red, especially in bud. That mix of colours gives it its best-known folk name, "eggs and bacon," one of dozens of local names. Its main name comes from its seed pods, which spread out from the stem like the toes of a bird's foot.
Like clover, it belongs to the pea family and hosts bacteria in its root nodules that fix nitrogen from the air. It thrives on thin, dry, low-nutrient ground where taller plants struggle, so it readily colonises old spoil and other brownfield land, adding small amounts of nitrogen as it grows.
It is a key foodplant for caterpillars, including those of the common blue butterfly and the six-spot burnet moth. In North East England, it also supports the dingy skipper, a scarce butterfly closely associated with brownfield and former industrial land, where patches of bird's-foot trefoil grow among bare ground. On former colliery sites, this small yellow flower can sustain wildlife that is now rare elsewhere.
This low, sprawling native perennial produces small clusters of yellow, pea-like flowers from May to September, often streaked with orange or red, especially in bud. That mix of colours gives it its best-known folk name, "eggs and bacon," one of dozens of local names. Its main name comes from its seed pods, which spread out from the stem like the toes of a bird's foot.
Like clover, it belongs to the pea family and hosts bacteria in its root nodules that fix nitrogen from the air. It thrives on thin, dry, low-nutrient ground where taller plants struggle, so it readily colonises old spoil and other brownfield land, adding small amounts of nitrogen as it grows.
It is a key foodplant for caterpillars, including those of the common blue butterfly and the six-spot burnet moth. In North East England, it also supports the dingy skipper, a scarce butterfly closely associated with brownfield and former industrial land, where patches of bird's-foot trefoil grow among bare ground. On former colliery sites, this small yellow flower can sustain wildlife that is now rare elsewhere.