Description:

• Perennial herbs, often glandular or lepidote, some with sweet roots
• Leaves imparipinnate; leaflets many, rarely 3, entire or glandular-denticulate, without stipels; stipules membranous, caducous
• Flowers blue, violet, white, or rarely yellowish, in axillary racemes or spikes; bracts narrow, membranous, caducous; bracteoles 0
• Calyx weakly bilabiate
• Petals: vexillum narrowly ovate or oblong, erect, shortly contracted at base; wings obliquely oblong, rather acute, free; keel longer than wings, acute or obtuse
• Stamens diadelphous or monadelphous; vexillary stamen free or connate with the rest into a sheath split above
• Ovary sessile, 2- or more-ovuled; style filiform or rather thick, incurved at apex; stigma terminal
• Pod ovate, oblong or shortly linear, straight or arcuate, turgid or compressed, glandular, muricate, bristly or rarely smooth, indehiscent or tardily 2-valved
• Seeds reniform or subglobose
• x = 8 (aneuploids)

Nomenclature:

• *Glycyrrhiza L.
  • Linnaeus: 741 (1753)
  • Hutchinson: 412 (1964)
  • Yeo: 127 (1968)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 20, mostly in Eurasia but thinly extending to Australia, North America and temperate South America
• Southern Africa: Species 1: *Glycyrrhiza glabra L., has become naturalised in the Montagu District of the Western Cape and in the Middelburg and Graaff-Reinet Districts of the Eastern Cape