- Family:
- Fabaceae Lindl.
Microcharis Benth.

[FSOM]
M. Thulin et al. Flora of Somalia, Vol. 1-4 [updated 2008] https://plants.jstor.org/collection/FLOS
- Morphology General Habit
- Herbs or shrublets with biramous hairs
- Morphology Leaves
- Leaves 1–9(–13)-foliolate or simple
- Morphology Reproductive morphology Inflorescences
- Flowers in axillary racemes; bracts persistent
- Morphology Reproductive morphology Flowers Pedicel
- Pedicels long and usually standing at right-angles to the axis of the raceme in fruit
- Morphology Reproductive morphology Flowers Corolla
- Corolla pink or red, soon falling; standard glabrous; keel with lateral pouches but no spurs, sometimes beaked at the tip
- Morphology Reproductive morphology Flowers Androecium Stamens Filaments
- Vexillary stamen free, usually sterile; anthers with hyaline scales, apiculate
- Morphology Reproductive morphology Flowers Gynoecium Stigma
- Stigma oblique, discoid
- Morphology Reproductive morphology Fruits
- Pod linear, straight or curved, flattened, several- to many-seeded.
- Distribution
- Some 35 species in Africa, Madagascar and Arabia.
- Note
- Previously usually treated as a subgenus of Indigofera.
[LOWO]
Legumes of the World. Edited by G. Lewis, B. Schrire, B. MacKinder & M. Lock. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. (2005)
- Note
-
Polhill (1981f) recognised 4 genera and c. 710 species in Indigofereae. This treatment following Polhill (1994), Schrire (1995), Barker et al. (2000) and Schrire et al. (2003) recognises 7 genera and c. 768 species in the tribe (Fig. 44). The Indigofereae are predominantly African-Madagascan in distribution, occurring in seasonally dry vegetation types of the tropics and subtropics. The genus Indigofera (third largest in the Leguminosae) is pantropical in distribution.
Recent morphological-molecular analyses (Pennington et al., 2000a; Crisp et al., 2000; Wojciechowski et al., 2000, 2004; Hu, 2000; Kajita et al., 2001; Hu et al., 2002 and Wojciechowski, 2003) place Indigofereae at the base of a combined millettioid group of tribes (including Millettieae, Abreae, Phaseoleae, Desmodieae and Psoraleeae). This entire clade is sister to Hologalegina (comprising the robinioids and the Inverted Repeat Lacking Clade (IRLC)). Basally branching to these two clades are the South African Hypocalypteae and Australian tribes Mirbelieae and Bossiaeeae.
The Indigofereae (Barker et al., 2000; Schrire et al., 2003) comprises a Cyamopsis, Indigastrum, Microcharis and Rhynchotropis (CRIM) clade which is sister to the Indigofera-Vaughania clade. The Madagascan Phylloxylon is putatively the most basally branching genus in the tribe, although in some analyses in Schrire et al. (2003), Phylloxylon is sister to the CRIM clade.
Sister genus to Rhynchotropis (Barker et al., 2000) - Habit
- Herbs
- Ecology
- Seasonally dry tropical forest margins, woodland, thicket, wooded grassland and grassland, often in damp swampy or riverine areas, or in shallow soil over rock
- Distribution
- Africa (except largely W Africa; c. 16 spp. in Somalia-Masai and c. 18 spp. in Zambezian to Sudanian regions), Arabian Peninsula and Madagascar (2 spp.)
Native to:
Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Provinces, Central African Repu, Chad, Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Gulf States, Ivory Coast, Kenya, KwaZulu-Natal, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Northern Provinces, Oman, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Socotra, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Yemen, Zambia, Zaïre, Zimbabwe
- Microcharis ammophila (Thulin) Schrire
- Microcharis angolensis Baker
- Microcharis annua (Milne-Redh.) Schrire
- Microcharis aphylla (R.Vig.) Schrire, Du Puy & Labat
- Microcharis asparagoides (Taub.) Schrire
- Microcharis brevistaminea (J.B.Gillett) Schrire
- Microcharis buchneri (Taub.) Schrire
- Microcharis butayei (De Wild.) Schrire
- Microcharis cana (Thulin) Schrire
- Microcharis contorta (J.B.Gillett) Schrire
- Microcharis cufodontii (Chiov.) Schrire
- Microcharis disjuncta (J.B.Gillett) Schrire
- Microcharis ephemera (J.B.Gillett) Schrire
- Microcharis galpinii N.E.Br.
- Microcharis garissaensis (J.B.Gillett) Schrire
- Microcharis gyrata (Thulin) Schrire
- Microcharis karinensis (Thulin) Schrire
- Microcharis kucharii (Thulin) Schrire
- Microcharis latifolia Benth.
- Microcharis longicalyx (J.B.Gillett) Schrire
- Microcharis medicaginea (Welw. ex Baker) Schrire
- Microcharis microcharoides (Taub.) Schrire
- Microcharis nematophylla Thulin
- Microcharis omissa Thulin
- Microcharis phyllogramme (R.Vig.) Schrire
- Microcharis praetermissa (Baker f.) Schrire
- Microcharis remotiflora (Taub. ex Baker f.) Schrire
- Microcharis sessilis (Thulin) Schrire
- Microcharis spathulata (J.B.Gillett) Schrire
- Microcharis stipulosa (Chiov.) Schrire
- Microcharis tenella Benth.
- Microcharis tenuirostris (Thulin) Schrire
- Microcharis tisserantii (Pellegr.) Schrire
- Microcharis tritoides (Baker) Schrire
- Microcharis wajirensis (J.B.Gillett) Schrire
- Microcharis welwitschii (Baker) Schrire
Microcharis Benth. appears in other Kew resources:
Date | Reference | Identified As | Barcode | Type Status | Has image? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Schrire, B.D. [2571], Kenya | 62730.000 | No |
First published in Trans. Linn. Soc. London 25: 297 (1865)
Accepted by
- Govaerts, R., Nic Lughadha, E., Black, N., Turner, R. & Paton, A. (2021). The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00997-6 Scientific Data 8: 215.
Literature
Flora of Somalia
- Flora Somalia, Vol 1, (1993) Author: by M. Thulin [updated by M. Thulin 2008]
- Schrire in Bothalia 22: 165–170 (1992).
-
Flora of Somalia
Flora of Somalia
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
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Herbarium Catalogue Specimens
-
Kew Backbone Distributions
The International Plant Names Index and World Checklist of Selected Plant Families 2022. Published on the Internet at http://www.ipni.org and http://apps.kew.org/wcsp/
© Copyright 2017 World Checklist of Selected Plant Families. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
-
Kew Names and Taxonomic Backbone
The International Plant Names Index and World Checklist of Selected Plant Families 2022. Published on the Internet at http://www.ipni.org and http://apps.kew.org/wcsp/
© Copyright 2017 International Plant Names Index and World Checklist of Selected Plant Families. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
-
Legumes of the World Online
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0