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Tephrosia purpurea
Also called Hawaiian Fish Poisoning Plant, Purple Tephrosia, Wild Indigo, Purple Hoarypea
Tephrosia purpurea is a drought-tolerant wild legume (Fabaceae) of arid and semi-arid regions from Africa to South Asia, grown more as a wild or landscape plant than a garden crop. It thrives in deep, poor soil and is rarely cultivated for care at home.
Tephrosia purpurea is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae. It grows in poor soils as a common wasteland weed and has a pantropical distribution. It is a type of legume native to south-western Asia (the Levant, Arabian Peninsula, Socotra, Iran, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka) and north-eastern Africa (Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia).
The leaflets of the plant are obovate-oblong and equal-sided, and of a silky texture. The fruits (legumes) are typically 1 to 2 in (25 to 51 mm) long and contain six or seven brownish seeds. The species typically grows in areas where the soils are relatively deep, especially in semi-arid and wadi areas, and on terraces and slight inclines and hills.
Tephrosia purpurea is cited as "unpalatable", although the seeds of the plant are reportedly a favourite of sandgrouse inhabiting the scrub-desert of northern Sudan, and the butterfly Colias croceus is known to feed on it. This has allowed it to colonize the landscape in parts of the Middle East which have been overgrazed, especially at lower altitudes.
The species is known to be toxic to goats; a study published in the early 1980s revealed that 11 out of 12 goats died after 1 to 40 days of daily oral dosing of Tephrosia purpurea shoots (fresh or dried), and that they displayed adverse reactions to ingesting it such as dyspnoea, weakness of the limbs and joints causing instability in movement, changes in fat composition, catarrhal enteritis, and hemorrhage in the heart, lungs, and intestinal mucosa. Rotenoids extracted from the seeds of the plant also caused complete mortality in Aphis craccivora, when applied at a concentration of 0.1% for 48 hours.
The species is recorded in the north-eastern African nations of Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, the Western Asian nations of Iran, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, South Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen (including the Yemeni island of Socotra), and the South Asian nations of India and Pakistan. Within India, it is documented in the western states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Tephrosia purpurea by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
