Description:

• Deciduous or semideciduous, medium to large trees; branchlets terete
• Leaves bipinnate, opposite, pinna rachis subwinged; leaflets many, narrowly elliptic, sessile
• Flowers pedicellate, in an open, terminal panicle
• Calyx reduced, 5-denticulate, broadly campanulate, subpuberulous
• Corolla tubular-campanulate above a slightly narrowed, curved tube, mauvish blue, rarely white, pubescent outside; tube white, partly pubescent inside; limb slightly bilabiate; lobes 5, rounded, ± equal, spreading
• Stamens 4, didynamous, arising ± at top of narrow part of corolla tube, included; filaments pubescent below middle; anthers glabrous, unithecate as second theca reduced to minute appendage; staminode 1, exceeding stamens, glandular-pubescent at middle and apex
• Nectary short, pulvinate
• Ovary flattened-cylindrical, bilocular, with 2 axile, vertical, placental ridges per locule, glabrous; ovules 6-8-seriate in each locule; style filiform, included, tapering slightly into bilobed stigma
• Fruit a woody capsule, broadly oval to suborbicular, apex often a little emarginate, base truncate to subcordate, strongly compressed perpendicularly to the septum, dehiscing parallel to the plane of compression; valves glabrous, smooth, margins not or slightly undulate
• Seeds thin, with wing ± surrounding and clearly demarcated from seed body, hyaline-membranous with brownish streaks
• x = 9 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Jacaranda Juss.
  • Jussieu: 138 (1789)
  • Don: t. 631 (1822)
  • Gentry: 72 (1977)
  • Gentry & Morawetz in Gentry: 51 (1992)
  • Henderson: 88 (1995)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 49 species, neotropical, from northwest Argentina to Bolivia, widely cultivated as an ornamental tree
• Southern Africa: Species 1: *Jacaranda mimosifolia D.Don, naturalised in warmer parts extending from Soutpansberg (Northern Province) to Grahamstown (Eastern Cape), also in Swaziland
  • It is a proposed declared invader