A prostrate and generally trailing perennial herb, with stems up to 1.5 m long. The plant is covered with long, roughish, spreading, pale hairs. It has enormous underground tubers, with creeping flowering branches bearing large, hairy, lobed leaves. Leaves pinnately 3-foliate.

Flowers are blue, dark blue, violet or purple, compactly few (6–20), and they develop into large, linear-oblong to oblong, dehiscent, woody pods. Pods 60–110 mm long, dehiscent, swollen, appressed brown, silky-hairy. Seeds 3–8, sub-globose or ovoid-oblong, compressed, black. Flowering time is in early to midsummer: October–January.