Description:

• Perennial lianas; roots usually with conspicuously swollen tubers; stems irregularly striate, lenticellate, branchlets terete, often rooting at nodes, attached to support by adventitious rootlets
• Leaves with 2 lanceolate to broadly ovate leaflets, often with a terminal trifid, hooked tendril; opposite, petiolate; pseudostipules small, ± ovate
• Flowers large, pedicellate, in an axillary panicle, usually reduced to 1 or 3 flowers but rarely up to 15; peduncles short, branches ± glabrous
• Calyx membranous, cupular, subtruncate with sinuous margin, glabrous to slightly lepidote
• Corolla tubular-campanulate, yellow; tube glabrous outside, glabrous or partly puberulous or pubescent inside; limb oblique; lobes obovate, shorter than tube
• Stamens 4(5), didynamous, included, arising at top of narrow part of corolla tube; anthers glabrous, thecae straight, divaricate; staminode 1(0)
• Ovary linear, minutely lepidote to subpuberulous, bilocular; ovules in 4 rows per locule but may appear as 2 in cross sections
• Nectary annular
• Fruit a long, narrow, linear capsule, tapering at ends, compressed, leathery; valves parallel to septum; dehiscence septicidal
• Seeds membranous, with 2 wings not sharply demarcated from seed body, blunt-ended, mostly brown and irregularly hyaline at apex

Nomenclature:

• *Macfadyena A.DC.
  • Candolle: 179 (1845)
  • Bailey & Bailey: 692 (1977)
  • Gentry: 85 (1977)
  • Henderson: 96 (1995)
• Doxantha Miers
  • Miers: 189 (1863)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 3 or 4, centred in tropical America
• Southern Africa: Species 1: *Macfadyena unguis-cati (L.) A.Gentry, exotic, a widespread garden escape but naturalised in Levubu, Magoebaskloof and Duiwelskloof (Northern Province), Sabi and possibly Nelspruit (Mpumalanga), and Durban and Pietermaritzburg areas (KwaZulu-Natal)