It is an erect, medium sized tree of 12 to 15 m high, with a crooked trunk and irregular branches. The shoots are clothed with gray or brown silky pubescence. The bark is ash coloured. The leaves 3 foliate, large and stipulate. Petiole is 10 to 15 cm long. Leaflets are obtuse, glabrous above, finely silky and conspicuously reticulately veined beneath with cunnate or deltoid base. From January to March the plant is bald. Flowers in rigid racemes of 15 cm long, densely brown velVety on bare branches. Calyx is dark, olive green to brown in colour and densely velvety outside. The corolla is long with silky silvery hairs outside and bright orange red. Stamens are diadelphes, anthers uniform. Ovary 2 ovule, style filiform, curved and stigma capitate. Pods argenteo-canesent, narrowed, thickened at the sutures, splitting round the single apical seed, lowest part indehiscent. The seeds are flat, reniform, curved.

Antifertility (flower and seed); anthelmintic and laxative (seed); astringent (gum); stops secretions and hemostatic, bitter, pungent, emmenagogue, alliterative,tonic, diuretic, aphrodisiac.

Plant Creations Inc.
Herbal Monograph

Leucocyanidin and its tetramer, procyanidin, a mucilaginous substance, gallic acid and tannic acid (which yields pyrocatechin) (gum), a fixed oil, palasonin, alpha-amyrin, beta-sitosterol, a resin and albuminoid (seed), palastrin, butin and butrin (flower).

For dysentery, diarrhea, phthisis and bleeding within the bladder and stomach (gum); as a laxative (seed); in hemorrhoids and boils (leaf); as an anthelmintic, specially useful in the treatment of roundworms and tapeworms (seed oil); diabetes, gallbladder stone, sore throat and leucorrhea.

Abortifacient

Chandel et al., Biodiversity in Medicinal and Aromatic Plants in India.