Description:

• Trees or shrubs, sometimes scandent, usually armed with spines or prickles but sometimes unarmed
• Leaves bipinnate or rarely with pinnae digitately arranged; leaflets opposite, rarely alternate, few to many, glandular or sometimes eglandular; stipules various
• Inflorescence of terminal, sometimes falsely lateral, or terminal and axillary racemes or panicles; bracts various, sometimes caducous
• Flowers bisexual, irregular, often large
• Calyx with short, campanulate tube, 5 lobes longer than tube, imbricate
• Petals 5, not all equal, upper one usually somewhat modified and usually with a small lamina and a more pronounced claw
• Stamens 10, free, declinate; filaments often glandular or villous at base; anthers dorsifixed
• Ovary subsessile or shortly stipitate, 2-10-ovuled; style with terminal, truncate, concave or hollow stigma
• Pods very variable, compressed, ovate, oblong, lanceolate, or sometimes falcate, indehiscent or dehiscent and 2-valved, hard and woody or thick and pulpy, sometimes spiny
• Seeds transverse or nearly so, hard
• x = 12 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Caesalpinia L.
  • Linnaeus: 380 (1753)
  • Harvey: 269 (1862)
  • Hutchinson: 260 (1964)
  • Brenan: 28 (1967)
  • Schreiber: 7 (1967)
  • Ross: 122 (1977)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 200, cosmopolitan in warm regions
• Southern Africa: Species 6, indigenous in Namibia, Botswana, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Northern Cape; others introduced
  • *Caesalpinia decapetala (Roth) Alston, has run wild, especially in eastern areas; see Henderson & Anderson: 176 (1966)