Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herbs, subshrubs, shrubs, or rarely small trees.

Stems: Plants pubescent with straight or uncinate hairs.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves compound. Alternate. Blades with 1 or 3(5,7) leaflets. Petiolate. Stipules present dry and membranous, distinct. Leaflets stipellate.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal and axillary or rarely leaf–opposed, racemose, paniculate, or rarely fasciculate inflorescences, principal bracts striate, persistent or caducous, each subtending (1)2 to several flowers, sometimes with secondary bracts subtending flowers. Flowers papilionaceous; bracteoles absent or minute and borne at base of calyx. Calyx campanulate, 2–lipped or subequally 5-lobed. Corolla exceeding the calyx, standard broadly obovate to suborbicular, rounded or emarginate, wings oblong, usually dark–colored, keel petals long–clawed. Stamens 10, connate into a tube or the upper stamen distinct to middle or base. Ovary superior; ovules 2 to numerous.

Fruit: Pods compressed; (1)2–jointed to many–jointed; constricted on lower or both sutures to form 1–seeded indehiscent articles; faces reticulate–veined; usually pubescent; the hairs uncinate and/or straight. Seeds compressed; ellipsoid to subquadrate; often rimarillate.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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