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Genista aspalathoides Lam.

Spa.: Aliaga, genista.   Fre.: Genêt à faux aspalathus.   Ara.: Guendul, auira, lihyat el sheikh.

Shrub up to 1 m in height, spiny, hermaphrodite, cushion-shaped or semiprostrate, highly branched, with tortuous stems and erect branches. Stem and older branches with brown bark, longitudinally fissured, turning glabrous. Young branchlets longitudinally striated, sericeous and turning hairy at the ribs, with a spiny or sharp tip. Leaves alternate, unifoliolate and at least some trifoliolate, with stipules —stipular organ with 3 ribs—, subsessile, with leaflets 3-15 × 1-3 mm, lanceolate or linear-lanceolate, usually mucronate, attenuated at the base, green, sericeous-silvery on both sides. Flowers solitary or in racemiform groups of 2-4(5) at the axils of the branches of the current year, pedicellate, with pedicel up to 7 mm, sericeous. Calyx 7-8 mm, sericeous, split into 2 subequal lips and usually longer than the tube, the upper lip bipartite in 2 ovate-triangular segments, and the lower lip tridentate, with linear-lanceolate ciliolate teeth. Corolla 11-15 mm, papilionoid, yellow, with standard ovate, rounded or emarginate at the apex, sericeous on the dorsal side, longer than the wings, wings glabrous, and keel hairy. Androecium monadelphous with 10 stamens. Ovary sericeous, and terminal stigma. Pod 12-23 × 4-6 mm, linear-oblong, compressed, densely sericeous, with 2-4 seeds. Seeds 1.75-2 mm, ovoid-subglobose, smooth, brown, without an aril.

Flowering:

March to May.

 

Fruiting:

May to July.

Habitat:

Forests and thickets from sea level to mid-mountain areas, in humid and subhumid environments.

Distribution:

Sicily and Pantelleria (Italy) and in North Africa. Within the study area it only grows in northern Tunisia (towards the N along the mountains the Dorsal and to the NE up to Cap Bon), and it is scarce in Algeria (extreme NE of the country —Cap Rosa, near El Kalaa—).

Observations:

It is similar to G. lobelii subsp. longipes (Pau) Heywood [G. longipes Pau, Spartium erinaceoides Loisel., G. aspalathoides subsp. erinaceoides (Loisel.) Maire], a thorny subshrub of only 0.5m in height, with unifoliolate leaves with smaller leaflets, 1-6 mm long, solitary flowers with long pedicels and somewhat smaller. It is a taxon endemic to NW Africa, growing in Morocco (steppes of Midelt) and Algeria (steppe and mountains plateaux of the western area of the country, reaching towards the E up to the Jebel Getian, near Constantine).

Conservation status:

Both species have a small distribution area and with small number of specimens. Its conservation status in North Africa should be studied further. In the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, it is listed as Near Threatened (NT) at global level.

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