Creeping Beggarweed, Ka’imi clover, Spanish clover, Spanish tick-trefoil.

Description:

Desmodium incanum is a perennial plant with trailing and creeping stems that can become more or less woody, growing from a deep, branched root system. The plant can grow 10 - 100cm tall. The plant is harvested from the wild for local use as a medicine.

Habitat:

In our garden in Windwardside, on the Vulcanic island of Saba in the Caribbean Sea. Moist or wet thickets or open banks or fields, sometimes in open, pine or oak forest, frequently a weed in waste ground; at elevations up to 1,400 metres.

Notes:

The whole plant is used in the treatment of haemorrhages. Combined with congo pump (Cecropia sp.) and/or Leonotis nepetifolia, it is used to treat kidney defects. Combined with Asclepias curassavica and Phyllanthus amarus, it is used to treat womb ailments. Applied externally, the plant is used to treat wounds and cuts. One of the commonest weedy plants of many parts of the Central American lowlands, it has escaped from cultivation and become a weed in many areas outside its native range. Because of the abundant small uncinate hairs on most species, the seedpods cling most tenaciously to clothing, to any part of the human body, and also to the feathers and hair of various animals, thus ensuring a wide dispersal of the plants. In regions where it is naturalized, it is particularly common along roadsides, wasteland and other disturbed ground.