Common Name: Tahitian kidneywood

Duration: Perennial

Nativity: Native

Lifeform: Tree

General: Profusely branched small tree or shrub 2.5-6 m tall with erect and ascending branches that are slender and puberulent when young.

Leaves: Odd pinnate leaves, 5-15 cm long with stipules 2-3 mm long, bearing 21-55 leaflets, these oblong and 8-20 mm long, puberulent on both surfaces, glandular punctate with minute dark glands below.

Flowers: Racemose with racemes 5-17 cm long, small bracts and papillionoid flowers with a calyx about 3-4 mm long, the tube 2-3 mm long, glandular dotted and puberulent, the petals white to red 5-7 mm long, style upcurved and glandular near tip.

Fruits: Pods straight to upcurved at the tip, 10-15 mm long, thin, and puberulent to glandular punctate, reflexed and spreading at maturity.

Ecology: Found on rocky and gravelly ridges and along watercourses, often along water courses below 5,500 ft (1676 m), flowers April-September.

Distribution: se AZ, sw NM; south to c MEX.

Notes: Distinguished as a medium to large shrub or small tree with shaggy irregular plates of the bark; long, bending, pinnately compound leaves with short hairs and brown, sunk-in (punctate) glands on the bottoms, when crushed, the leaves are said to smell like tangerine; also distinct are the spike-like racemes with white flowers which emerge from the centers of bunches of leaves followed by the straight pods.

Ethnobotany: Unknown

Etymology: Eysenhardtia is named for the 19th century German botany professor Karl Wilhelm Eysenhardt, while orthocarpa means straight fruit.

Synonyms: Eysenhardtia amorphoides var. orthocarpa, Viborquia orthocarpa

Editor: SBuckley 2012, FSCoburn 2015