Low shrubs to small trees with leafless green crooked spiny branches, up to 5 m (rarely more) high. Leaves present on young twigs, caducous, linear, 4-20 mm long, 1-3 mm broad, often spine-tipped, subsessile; stipular spines 1-6 mm long, straight or slightly curved, yellow or brown. Inflorescence few to many flowered, ebracteate corymbs on short lateral shoots. Flowers 1-2 cm across on 1-1.5 cm long slender pedicel, usually brick red (shades of pink or yellow are not uncommon). Sepals petaloid, usually 5-8 mm long, 3-5 mm broad, ovate-oblong, upper one distinctly saccate, often with floccose-ciliate margins. Petals about as long as the sepals, puberulous, upper pair slightly larger and hidden in the saccate sepal. Stamens generally 10-15, about 10-20 mm long, often red in colour. Gyno¬phore 10-15 mm long; ovary about 2 mm in diam. with a beak about 1 mm long. Fruit globose, 10-15 mm in diam., slightly beaked, glabrous smooth, deep red when ripe and with thin pericarp; seeds reniform, 2-5 mm in diam.

Type: Arabia, Yemen, Forsskhal (C).

Distribution: N. and Tropical Africa,Arabia, eastward to India.

One of the common shrubs of arid plains of Sind, Baluchistan & Punjab, flowering abundantly during the hot weather. The wood is hard and bitter and resistant to attacks of white ants; it is used for making knees of boats in Sind. The young fruits and flower buds are pickled.