Description:

• Herbs, shrubs, rarely scandent, or trees, usually armed with prickles
• Leaves bipinnate, rarely undeveloped or petiole forming a phyllode, often sensitive; glands sometimes present on petiole
• Flowers bisexual or unisexual with few bisexual, in globose heads or cylindric spikes on axillary, solitary or fascicled peduncles, (3)4-5(6)-merous
• Calyx usually small, rarely campanulate
• Corolla tubular, often campanulate, with linear lobes
• Stamens free, as many as corolla lobes or twice as many or more, exserted
• Ovary usually sessile, 2-many-ovuled; style filiform, sometimes oblique on ovary, with small, terminal stigma
• Pod usually compressed, sometimes transversely articulated, margins persisting as an empty frame, densely setose
• Seeds compressed, ovate or suborbicular
• x = 13 (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Mimosa L.
  • Linnaeus: 516 (1753)
  • Brenan: 42 (1959)
  • Brenan & Brummitt: 47 (1970)
  • Ross: 117 (1975)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 500, widely distributed through the tropics but the vast majority of species found in South America
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Mimosa pigra L., on northern flood plains of Namibia and N KwaZulu-Natal, and one species: *Mimosa pudica L. var. hispida Brenan has become naturalised