Description:

• Herbs or small shrubs, sometimes with annual stems from a woody rootstock, with simple or stellate hairs
• Leaves serrate, dentate, repand or lobed with basal teeth often prolonged into long setaceous points; petioles usually more densely pubescent on upper side; stipules lateral, usually setaceous or subacute
• Flowers in bracteate, pedunculate cymes ± opposed to leaves, or peduncle obsolete
• Sepals 4 or 5, usually narrow, often caudate at apex
• Petals as long as sepals, obovate, oblanceolate or linear, yellow, usually with a short basal claw ciliolate on margin
• Stamens 7-many, filamentous, borne on a very short, glabrous androgynophore which is annular at apex with stamens arising between annulus and ovary
• Ovary 2-5-locular, with 2 to many axile ovules in each locule; style glabrous; stigma cup-shaped or slightly 2-6-lobed or capitate-fimbriate
• Fruit an elongated or subglobose capsule, glabrous or hairy, smooth, bristly, or prickly, straight or curved, loculicidally 2-5-valved, sometimes with transverse septa within, 2-many-seeded
• Seeds dark brown or black, pendulous or horizontal, quadrate, ellipsoid, cylindric or irregularly hemispherical; embryo usually curved; cotyledons flat; endosperm fleshy
• x = 7 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Corchorus L.
  • Linnaeus: 529 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 234 (1754)
  • Candolle: 504 (1824)
  • Harvey: 228 (1860)
  • Wild: 82 (1963)
  • Wild: 32 (1984)
  • Edmonds: 15 (1990)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 100, widely distributed through tropics and subtropics
• Southern Africa: Species 15, in all countries and provinces except Lesotho and Western Cape