Description:

• Erect, twining or scrambling perennial herbs or shrubs, often with prostrate or tuberous rhizomes or rootstocks
• Leaves alternate, entire or 2-7-lobed, cordate, 3-7-nerved, petiolate, conduplicate in bud; stipules 0 but an axillary bud often producing a clasping, broadly reniform leaf (pseudostipule)
• Flowers bisexual, irregular, epigynous, solitary or in fascicles, axillary, with or without bracts
• Perianth simple, fused to form a straight, curved, or S-shaped, coloured tube, inflated at basal part (utricle), then contracted or narrowed above in a cylindrical to funnel-shaped part (tube), gradually elongated, enlarged and expanded into the 1-lipped or (1-6)-lobed limb, often with dark reddish or brownish colour and foetid smell; inside of utricle often provided with 2(-6) glandular bodies
• Stamens usually 6 or more; filaments scarcely distinguishable from column; anthers sessile and adnate to style column in a gynostemium, 4-celled, dehiscing longitudinally
• Ovary inferior, 3-6-carpellate, oblong or elongate, slightly 6-angular and 5- or 6-locular; placentation axile; ovules many, anatropous; styles 3, 5 or 6, marginally connate, fleshy, with coroniform to subcapitate stigmatic lobes
• Fruit a capsule, septicidally dehiscent, with 6 valves or splitting through placentas, obovoid to short-cylindrical
• Seeds usually many, ovate, deltoid or triangular, compressed, mostly winged all round or thick with an elaiosome; testa crustaceous or hard, finely verrucose or smooth; embryo well developed but minute; endosperm abundant, oily, starch-free
• x = 7 (4, 5, 6, 8, 13) (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Aristolochia L.
  • Linnaeus: 960 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 410 (1754)
  • Adanson: 71 (1763)
  • Jussieu: 72 (1789)
  • Willdenow: 151 (1805)
  • Brown: 349 (1810)
  • Endlicher: 345 (1837)
  • Duchartre: 421 (1864)
  • Bentham: 123 (1880)
  • Solereder: 272 (1889)
  • Baker & Wright: 135 (1909)
  • Burtt Davy: 115 (1926)
  • Schmidt: 235 (1935)
  • Davis & Khan: 515 (1961)
  • Ball: 73 (1964)
  • Davis & Khan: 552 (1982)
  • Verdcourt: 4 (1986)
  • Huber: 137 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 120, ranging from Europe (mainly Mediterranean) and tropical Africa, including Madagascar, through warm-temperate and tropical Asia to Japan, the Philippines, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and North Australia
• Southern Africa: Species 2, introduced: *Aristolochia elegans Mast., Dutchman's Pipe, a native of Paraguay, North Argentina and Brazil occurs as an escape in the Northern Province, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal and *A. albida Duch., reported as an escape in Namibia