Description :

• Shrubs, suffrutices or herbs
• Leaves 3-1-foliolate or, if digitately 3-5-foliolate, then leaflet margins entire, otherwise either coarsely dentate and conspicuously gland-dotted to undulate and repand-denticulate and black-punctate; leaflets ovate, lanceolate, orbiculate or elliptic, glabrous to densely pubescent; stipules linear-subulate, free and adhering to base of leaf rachis, persistent
• Flowers purple, purple-blue, rarely pale-coloured, sessile, occasionally subsessile, aggregated in 3-40 triplets into long axillary pedunculate spikes or shortly pedunculate or subsessile axillary clusters, each triplet of flowers subtended by a single ovate bract
• Calyx either glabrous or strongly glandular-punctate, campanulate with lowest lobe longest, or densely pubescent, sparsely glandular and bilabiate with lowest lobe longest and upper lobes connate high up
• Petals : vexillum narrowly obovate or obovate with weakly developed claw and auricles without appendages; wing petals longer than keel, oblong with prominent basal lobe; sculpturing well developed; keel broadly obliquely lunate
• Stamens diadelphous; vexillary stamen usually free or subbasifixed, rest united into a sheath slit adaxially; anthers uniform, alternately basifixed and versatile
• Ovary substipitate, either glabrous with club-headed glands or pubescent; style upcurved, slender, rarely swollen; stigma either minute or capitate, rarely penicillate
• Pod erect, indehiscent, conspicuously glandular-warty, glabrous or white pubescent
• Seeds obliquely reniform

Nomenclature:

• Cullen Medik.
  • Medikus: 380 (1787)
  • Stirton: 317 (1981a)
  • Stirton: 342 (1981b)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 40, a few in drier parts of Africa, but most extending through India and Sri Lanka to Burma, Phillipines, Papua New Guinea and Australia
• Southern Africa : Species 4, widespread