Lessertia frutescens flowers and fruit pods

The Lessertia frutescens orange red flowers grow here from leaf axils near a stem-tip. The long banner petals are longitudinally lined and shiny, as are the duller brown red calyx cups at the back ends of the corollas. The banner petals curve back in their upper parts, more when they have reached full length in open flowers. The less visible, pointy red parts are the keel petals. They are flanked by wing petals, five petals in all in a corolla.

The narrow, deep blue leaflets in picture fold in and have very short petiolules. They are paired, well spaced on this plant and vary in pointing backwards, outwards or forwards on the ridged, curved rachises. 

The dramatically inflated whitish fruit pods present below the flowers in the photo show the ridges or sutures on top that are margins of the two pod valves or halves forming the cover in which the ovules develop to seeds. There is another suture out of sight below on each pod, and numerous transversal dark lines or ridges visible on the pod surfaces.

Balloon pea, in Afrikaans kankerbos (cancer bush) or gansies (goslings) and previously in botanical nomenclature Sutherlandia frutescens, is one of the attractive indigenous shrubs and prominent medicinal plants of South Africa, rich in lore.

It is also one of the many indigenous legumes that deposit nitrogen in the soil for use by plants through a symbiotic relationship with certain bacteria (Euston-Brown and Kruger, 2023; iNaturalist; https://pza.sanbi.org).