Description:

• Succulent shrubs or shrublets; stems often large and swollen at base, sometimes largely subterranean, with fleshy branches
• Leaves alternate or in spirals, often in terminal fascicles, simple, entire, sessile or shortly petioled; axillary glands conspicuous, several in each axil; stipules minute or 0
• Inflorescence a few-flowered, subsessile, terminal cyme
• Flowers usually showy, pink, red or purple, or sometimes partly white
• Calyx divided almost to base; lobes lanceolate or subulate, eglandular within
• Corolla funnel-shaped or campanulate from a short, cylindric base; lobes ± as long as tube, ovate or obovate, overlapping to the right, with paired, small or obscure scales in mouth alternating with lobes, ± confluent and forming obtriangular pockets
• Stamens 4, inserted at base of widened part of corolla tube; filaments very short; anthers 4-locular, conniving in a cone and fused with stigma, lanceolate, with long, filiform, terminal appendages, sagittate at base, polliniferous in upper portion only, with foot of connective bearing small projection in centre and brush-like cushion below
• Disc 0
• Ovary of 2 free carpels; style cylindric, short; stigma capitate with basal rim and minute, bifid apiculus; ovules many, pluriseriate
• Mericarps follicular
• Seeds linear-oblong with a deciduous tuft of hairs at each end
• x = 11

Nomenclature:

• Adenium Roem. & Schult.
  • Roemer & Schultes: xxxv, 411 (1819)
  • Stapf: 513 (1907)
  • Codd: 278 (1963)
  • Plaizier: 464 (1985)
• Idaneum H.Post & Kuntze
  • Post & Kuntze: 296 (1904)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 5, S Arabian Peninsula, Socotra, Northeast, West central Africa
• Southern Africa: Species 4, Namibia, Botswana, Northern Province, North-West, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern and Eastern Cape