Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs, or softly woody undershrubs
• Leaves 3-foliolate, with 1 or 2 leaflets near stem resembling stipules; stipules minutely tuberculate or 0
• Flowers in axillary umbels, rarely solitary; bracts 3-bracteolate
• Calyx variable; lobes equal, or subequal, or rarely calyx 2-lipped
• Petals free or sometimes adnate to base of calyx tube; vexillum sessile or clawed; wings sometimes eared, clawed and gibbous; keel incurved or inflexed, beaked, gibbous
• Stamens diadelphous, vexillary stamen free, alternate filaments expanded at apex
• Ovary sessile or subsessile, many-ovuled; style inflexed above ovary, with terminal or lateral sometimes capitate stigma
• Pod oblong or linear, straight or curved, terete, turgid, rarely planocompressed, 2-valved, usually septate within
• Seeds subglobose or lenticular
• x = 6, 7 (aneuploids, polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• Lotus L.
  • Linnaeus: 773 (1753)
  • Harvey: 157 (1862)
  • Gillett: 361 (1958)
  • Gillett: 1042 (1971)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 100, fairly cosmopolitan
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Lotus discolor E.Mey. subsp. discolor, the four northern provinces, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape; several other species introduced and rare as escapes