Description:

• Herbs, shrubs, or small, slender trees
• Leaves paripinnate; leaflets usually in more than 10 pairs, oblong, entire, often unequal-sided at base, stipulate
• Flowers yellow, in racemes or panicles, rarely solitary or 2, bracteate
• Calyx with widely campanulate tube; lobes often subequal
• Petals: vexillum nearly always streaked or spotted with purple, clawed, with 2 free or adnate appendages at base; appendages rarely 0; wings clawed, sometimes eared; keel with claw ± equal to limb
• Stamens diadelphous; anthers uniform
• Ovary sessile or stalked, many-ovuled, sometimes pilose with soft spreading hairs; style incurved, with small, capitate stigma
• Pod linear or sometimes oblong, compressed, 4-angled or -winged, 2-valved or subindehiscent, usually septate within
• Seeds 8-50, ellipsoid, oblong or subquadrate
• x = 6, 7, 8 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Sesbania Scop.
  • Scopoli: 308 (1777) name conserved against Sesban Adans.: 326 (1763)
  • Harvey: 212 (1862)
  • Gillett: 91 (1963)
  • Gillett: 330 (1971)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species over 50, cosmopolitan in warm parts, generally in seasonally or permanently wet places
• Southern Africa: Species ± 18, widespread from Namibia and the four northern provinces into KwaZulu-Natal, Free State and Northern Cape