Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs, climbing or prostrate, rarely short and erect
• Leaves (1)3-foliolate, stipulate and stipellate; stipules varying from ovate to lanceolate or almost linear to filiform, base varying from spurred below point of attachment to cordate and median attachment with free lateral auricles
• Flowers shading from white flushed with mauve to cream flushed with green or yellow; or shading from blue, lilac, mauve, purple to magenta, racemose, 1 or 2 together or fasciculate at top of axillary peduncles; bracts small, caducous
• Calyx with campanulate tube; 2 upper lobes or teeth separate or connate
• Petals: vexillum reflexed, from reniform to oblate, with basal, inflexed appendages and channelled claw; wings falcate-obovate, eared, clawed; keel incurved, sometimes into a somewhat spiral beak, clawed
• Stamens diadelphous or monadelphous; filaments often dilated above; anthers uniform
• Ovary sometimes with basal disc, sessile, with several to many ovules; style often thickened above, bearded along inner margin, with oblique or introrsely lateral stigma
• Pod subterete, straight or slightly incurved, 2-valved, dehiscing spirally (in wild species)
• Seeds reniform or subquadrate with lateral hilum
• x = 10, 11 (9, 12, 17) (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Vigna Savi
  • Savi: 113 (1824)
  • Harvey: 239 (1862)
  • Verdcourt: 617 (1971)
  • Maréchal et al.: 164 (1978)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 160, cosmopolitan in tropical regions of both hemispheres, with more than 50 of these occurring in tropical Africa
• Southern Africa: Species ± 18, widespread, but absent from the Western Cape