Description:

• Climbers or shrubs with woody, rarely herbaceous stems
• Leaves pinnately 3-foliolate; leaflets large, ovate or rhomboid, entire, scalloped or palmately lobed; stipules caducous or not
• Flowers white or mostly purplish or blue, (2)3 or 4-7 per node, in an elongate pseudoraceme; bracts narrow, early caducous; bracteoles small, subpersistent or minute and caducous
• Calyx campanulate with 5 teeth; upper teeth halfway to entirely connate
• Petals: vexillum appendaged with inflexed auricles; wings narrowly oblong or obovate-falcate, often adherent to the middle of the keel; keel sometimes beaked, subequal to wings
• Stamens: vexillary stamen connate, at least in middle with the others, rarely quite free; anthers uniform
• Ovary elongate, subsessile, many-ovuled, pubescent; style filiform or on a broadened base, glabrous except near ovary; stigma globular, short-papillose, often penicillate
• Pod hairy or glabrous, elongated, 2-valved, continuous or septate within
• Seeds compressed, oblong to suborbicular, minutely punctate
• x = 11, 12 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Pueraria DC.
  • Candolle: 97 (1825)
  • Hutchinson: 426 (1964)
  • Van der Maesen: 9 (1985)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 20, Asia
• Southern Africa: Species 1: *Pueraria lobata (Willd.) Ohwi var. lobata (Kudzu vine), has become naturalised in Mpumalanga