Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Erect or creeping annual or perennial herbs, pubescent with straight or uncinate hairs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves compound but appearing simple if unifoliate (unifoliate or sometimes trifoliate). Opposite. Petioles channeled and narrowly winged. Stipules papery, distinct or connate, persistent. Leaflets stipellate.

Flowers: Flowers paired, the pairs arranged in terminal, axillary, or leaf-opposed pseudoracemes, bracts scarious, deciduous. Flowers papilionaceous, bracteoles absent. Calyx papery, tubular, 5-lobed with the upper 2–lobes nearly completely connate. Corolla variously colored, standard obovate to orbicular, without auricles, wings adhering to keel, keel petals with a membranous appendage on each side. Stamens 10; upper stamen distinct, the other 9 connate into a tube, the distinct parts alternating in length. Ovary superior, several to numerous.

Fruit: Pods cylindrical or slightly compressed; symmetrical along upper and lower margins; ± constricted between the seeds; articulate; the articles rounded or short–cylindrical; truncate at each end; indehiscent. Seeds subglobose or ellipsoid.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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