Description:

• Herbs, undershrubs, or shrubs, rarely spinescent
• Leaves simple, 1-foliolate or digitately 3(-7)-foliolate, usually petiolate; stipules various, occasionally simple, filiform to foliaceous or lacking
• Flowers usually yellow, less often white or pink, rarely solitary, usually in heads or racemes opposite leaves or terminal; bracts small; bracteoles paired
• Calyx often with obliquely campanulate tube, usually 2-lipped; lobes variable
• Petals: vexillum mostly cordate and bicallosed at base within, usually clawed, glabrous or hairy outside; wings shorter than keel; keel angled or rounded near base or ± halfway, generally produced into a beak
• Stamens monadelphous; tube split; anthers unequal, alternatively long, basifixed, and smaller, dorsifixed
• Ovary sessile or stalked, 2-many-ovuled; style curved or geniculate, basal portion thick, often laterally pubescent; stigma usually small, rarely bilobed
• Pod sessile to long-stipitate, globose or cylindric, turgid or inflated, 5-valved, dehiscent
• Seeds 1-many, oblique-cordiform to oblong-reniform, on filiform funicles
• x = 7, 8 (aneuploids, polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• Crotalaria L.
  • Linnaeus: 714 (1753)
  • Harvey: 39 (1862)
  • Verdoorn: 371 (1928)
  • Polhill: 169 (1968)
  • Polhill: 3 (1982)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species over 600, fairly cosmopolitan in the tropics and extending into the subtropics particularly to the southern hemisphere
• Southern Africa: Species ± 64, widespread