''Geoffroea'' is a rather small genus of wild spiny

shrub A shrub (often also called a bush) is a small-to-medium-sized perennial woody plant. Unlike herbaceous plants, shrubs have persistent woody stems above the ground. Shrubs can be either deciduous or evergreen. They are distinguished from trees ...

s or small trees of tropical and subtropical

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the southe ...

. Although it gathers few species, they are highly extended geographically throughout the subcontinent. Each species is well known in its local area, as seen from the varied (and mostly domestic) usage of these trees as food, timber, or fuel. It was recently assigned to the informal

monophyletic In cladistics for a group of organisms, monophyly is the condition of being a clade—that is, a group of taxa composed only of a common ancestor (or more precisely an ancestral population) and all of its lineal descendants. Monophyletic gro ...

''Pterocarpus'' clade within the

Dalbergieae The tribe Dalbergieae is an early-branching clade within the flowering plant subfamily Faboideae (or Papilionaceae). Within that subfamily, it belongs to an unranked clade called the dalbergioids. It was recently revised to include many genera ...

References

Dalbergieae Fabaceae genera {{dalbergieae-stub