This is a list of Southern African trees, shrubs, suffrutices, geoxyles and lianes, and is intended to cover Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. [1]
The notion of 'indigenous' is of necessity a blurred concept, and is clearly a function of both time and political boundaries. The global distribution of plants useful to humans, or inadvertently transported by them, is closely linked to a mapping of their journeys and settlements, and the movement of species in prehistoric times must be inferred from archaeological and palaeontological remains, centers of diversity, DNA samples and other sources.
Combretum, the bushwillows or combretums, make up the type genus of the family Combretaceae. The genus comprises about 272 species of trees and shrubs, most of which are native to tropical and southern Africa, about 5 to Madagascar, but there are others that are native to tropical Asia, New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, Australia, and tropical America. Though somewhat reminiscent of willows (Salix) in their habitus, they are not particularly close relatives of these.
Indigofera is a large genus of over 750 species of flowering plants belonging to the pea family Fabaceae. They are widely distributed throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of the world.