A cotyledon is a significant part of the embryo within the seed of a plant, and is defined as "the embryonic leaf in seed-bearing plants, one or more of which are the first to appear from a germinating seed." The number of cotyledons present is one characteristic used by botanists to classify the flowering plants (angiosperms). Species with one cotyledon are called monocotyledonous ("monocots"). Plants with two embryonic leaves are termed dicotyledonous ("dicots").
The Fabaceae or Leguminosae, commonly known as the legume, pea, or bean family, are a large and agriculturally important family of flowering plants. It includes trees, shrubs, and perennial or annual herbaceous plants, which are easily recognized by their fruit (legume) and their compound, stipulate leaves. The family is widely distributed, and is the third-largest land plant family in number of species, behind only the Orchidaceae and Asteraceae, with about 765 genera and nearly 20,000 known species.
The Faboideae are a subfamily of the flowering plant family Fabaceae or Leguminosae. An acceptable alternative name for the subfamily is Papilionoideae, or Papilionaceae when this group of plants is treated as a family.
Abrus is a genus of flowering plants in the pea family, Fabaceae, and the only genus in the tribe Abreae. It contains 13–18 species, but is best known for a single species: jequirity. The highly toxic seeds of that species are used to make jewellery.
Bituminaria is small genus of perennial herbs in the bean family. It includes 10 species, which range from Macaronesia through Mediterranean Basin of Europe, north Africa, and Western Asia to the Caucasus and Saudi Arabia.
Dysphania ambrosioides, formerly Chenopodium ambrosioides, known as Jesuit's tea, Mexican-tea, payqu(paico), epazote, mastruz, or herba sanctæ Mariæ, is an annual or short-lived perennial herb native to Central America, South America, and southern Mexico.
Descriptive botanical names are scientific names of groups of plants that are irregular, not being derived systematically from the name of a type genus. They may describe some characteristics of the group in general or may be a name already in existence before regularised scientific nomenclature.
Rupert Charles Barneby was a British-born self-taught botanist whose primary specialty was the Fabaceae (Leguminosae), the pea family, but he also worked on Menispermaceae and numerous other groups. He was employed by the New York Botanical Garden from the 1950s until shortly before his death.
Andira is a genus of flowering plants in the legume family, Fabaceae. It is distributed in the tropical Americas, except for A. inermis, which also occurs in Africa. It was formerly assigned to the tribe Dalbergieae, but molecular phylogenetic studies in 2012 and 2013 placed it in a unique clade within subfamily Faboideae named the Andira clade.
Millettia is a genus of flowering plants in the family Fabaceae. It consists of about 169 species of shrubs, lianas or trees, which are native to tropical and subtropical regions of sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Indochina, southern China, Malesia, and New Guinea. Typical habitats include tropical rain forest and seasonally-dry lowland and upland forest and forest margins, woodland, thicket, wooded grassland, and secondary vegetation.
Otholobium is a genus of flowering plants in the pea family with over 50 named species, but several also remain undescribed sofar. Species may be herbaceous perennials, subshrubs, shrubs or small trees. The alternately set leaves are accompanied by stipules and mostly consist of three leaflets, sometimes just one. The inflorescences are on short or long stalks in the axils of the leaves. Within the inflorescences, the pea-like flowers occur in groups of three, rarely of two, subtended by a bract, and each individual flower also is subtended by a narrow bract. The petals may be white, pink, purple or blue, often with a differently colored nectar guide, that may sometimes even be yellow. The seedpods contain just one, black, dark or light brown seed. Most species are restricted to the Cape provinces of South Africa, but some occur at higher elevations in eastern Africa. Charles Stirton erected the genus in 1981. The species in South America will probably be segregated, because these are not sufficiently related to the African species.
Moraea bituminosa is a species of the genus Moraea in family Iridaceae.
Papilionaceous flowers are flowers with the characteristic irregular and butterfly-like corolla found in many, though not all, plants of the species-rich Faboideae subfamily of legumes. Tournefort suggested that the term Flores papilionacei originated with Valerius Cordus, who applied it to the flowers of the bean.
The tribe Psoraleeae is one of the subdivisions of the plant family Fabaceae. Recent phylogenetics has this tribe nested within tribe Phaseoleae.
Hypericum hircinum is a species of perennial flowering plant in the St John's wort family, Hypericaceae. It is known as goat St John's wort and stinking tutsan; both names refer to the plant's distinctive odor. The species is a bushy shrub that can grow up to 1.5 meters tall, is many-stemmed, and has golden yellow flowers with conspicuous stamens. The plant has been well-documented in botanical literature, with mentions dating back to at least 1627. Carl Linnaeus described H. hircinum several times, including in his 1753 Species Plantarum which established its binomial. At one point the plant was placed into the defunct genus Androsaemum, but it was returned to Hypericum by Norman Robson in 1985.
Androsaemum, commonly called tutsan, is a section of flowering plants in the family Hypericaceae. It is made up of Hypericum androsaemum, H. foliosum, H. grandifolium, and H. hircinum, as well as the hybrid H. × inodorum. When it was first described, it was considered its own independent genus, but was later placed under Hypericum and demoted to a section. It is also the namesake of an "Androsaemum-group" of related taxa that includes several other sections of Old World species. The Latin name Androsaemum comes from a Greek work to describe plants with red sap, and literally means "blood-man".
James Stirton was a Scottish physician and one of Scotland's leading experts on cryptogamic botany. His investigations in bryology and lichenology earned him a world-wide reputation.
Helena M. L. Forbes was a Scottish botanist, plant collector and curator who worked primarily on South African flora.
Otholobium spissum is a dense, tangled, much branched shrub of up to 185 cm (73 in) high that is assigned to the Pea family. It has dull green, clover-like leaves and white, pea-like flowers with a streaky, triangular, purple nectar guide. The species grows in renosterveld in the central mountains of the Western Cape province of South Africa. This species flowers in July and August.
Psoralea fascicularis, the large-stipule fountainbush, is a species in the pea or Fabaceae family. It is endemic to the Western Cape province of South Africa where it has been red listed as endangered (EN) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species due to its declining population.
