''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. 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.
References
Dalbergieae
Fabaceae genera
{{dalbergieae-stub