Description :

• Lianes and twining shrubs with milky latex
• Leaves sessile or subsessile
• Flowers in 2-many-flowered cymes, axillary and terminal, rarely flowers solitary
• Sepals ovate to suborbicular, usually with alternisepalous colleters
• Corolla with shallow, campanulate tube or divided nearly to base, sometimes with a flap in mouth of tube alternating with lobes; lobes oblong, usually with fleshy, submarginal ridges and sometimes also with decurrent, central ridge
• Corona of 5 simple inner lobes ± adnate to staminal column; lobes usually laterally compressed and curved inwards, sometimes small; outer lobes rarely present as small ridge beneath gymnostegial grooves
• Stamens arising on staminal curtain surrounding ovaries and adaxially fused to sides of style head
• Anthers 4-locular, with fimbriate, membranous appendages which are sometimes connate
• Pollinia 2 in each theca, erect, not surrounded by waxy outer wall; caudicles almost obsolete; corpuscle soft, white, usually larger than pollinia
• Style head variably shaped, with thick cylindrical part just above ovaries widening slightly towards apex, narrowing above this into usually bifid apex, with 5 stigmatic zones on sides of lower cylindrical part; pollinarium consisting of a small corpuscle, rarely with one or two small caudicles
• Ovary apocarpous, semi-inferior
• Follicles paired, fusiform or narrowly cylindric, often acuminate; ventrally dehiscent
• Seeds brown, compressed, lanceolate or linear, convex-concave or biconvex, with a single rib on one side, sometimes pubescent, with a tuft of hairs

Nomenclature:

• Secamone R.Br.
  • Brown: 44 (1810)
  • Brown: 542 (1907)
  • Endlicher 589 (1838)
  • Goyder: 437 (1992)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 100 in warmer regions of Old World, Africa and Madagascar
• Southern Africa : Species 5, widespread except in Namibia, Free State and Lesotho