Description:

• Lianes or sometimes erect shrubs or small trees, armed with scattered deflexed or hooked prickles usually present on branchlets, and often on leaf petioles and leaf and pinna rachides and, occasionally on pod sutures
• Leaves bipinnate; petiole with a conspicuous gland above base; pinnae usually with many pairs of opposite leaflets, rarely leaflets few (1-2 pairs); rachides of pinnae not modified into tendrils
• Flowers bisexual, sessile or subsessile, in often paniculately aggregated spikes
• Calyx cupular, shallowly 5-lobed
• Petals 5, connate, sometimes very shortly so at base, rarely free
• Stamens 10; anthers glandular at apex, soon deciduous
• Ovary pubescent, ± stipitate, or subsessile; style-tip narrowing to a small porate stigma
• Pod straight or curved, flat, splitting transversely into 1-seeded segments but leaving a persistent replum
• Seeds subcircular to obovate, compound, wingless, with a central aerole variable in shape

Nomenclature:

• Adenopodia C.Presl
  • Presl: 206 (1851)
  • Brenan: 77 (1986)
• Entada Adans.
  • Adanson: 318 (1763) in part

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 10, widespread and mainly tropical
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Adenopodia spicata (E.Mey.) C.Presl, from the Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal to the Eastern Cape