Description:

• Annual herbs, often with slender, flexuose, sprawling or climbing stems from taproots
• Leaves all cauline, four times pinnately divided, sometimes with sensitive petiolules; petioles often twining
• Inflorescence an elongated raceme, terminal on main stem and leaf-opposed branches; pedicels short; bracts usually persistent
• Flowers bilaterally symmetric, white or pink to purple
• Sepals peltate with attachment near base, ovate, base rounded, margin ± lacerate, apex acute to acuminate
• Petals: upper petal spurred, 2 inner petals and a lower petal not spurred
• Stamens 6, in 2 bundles of 3; filaments of each bundle completely connate, adhering basally to petals
• Ovary superior, ovoid; ovules 1 or 1 on each placenta; style promptly deciduous after anthesis, elongate; stigma with two big papillae
• Fruit an indehiscent nutlet, globular, hard-walled, with two apical pits
• Seed 1, with thin brown testa; endosperm with a hemisperical apical depression; elaiosome 0
• x = 7, 8 (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Fumaria L.
  • Linnaeus: 699 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 314 (1754)
  • Chamisso & Schlechtendal: 568 (1826)
  • Endlicher: 861 (1839)
  • Harvey:18 (1860)
  • Fedde: 141 (1936)
  • Exell: 181 (1960)
  • Henderson & Anderson: 148 (1966)
  • Meikle: 88 (1977)
  • Lidén: 42 (1986)
  • Lidén: 310 (1993)
  • Stern: 356 (1997)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 50; mostly Mediterranean, also to central Asia and 1 in the Himalayas, Atlantic islands, 1 in tropical Africa
• Southern Africa: Species 2: *Fumaria muralis Sond. ex Koch subsp. muralis (most common one) and *F. parviflora Lam.; widespread weeds, often in lucerne lands