An evergreen tree up to 50 feet high, this species is native to the Philippines and Taiwan. Its showy flowers appear in spring and summer. It is a useful specimen tree for lawns, roadside plantings, or in groupings. It has good wind tolerance and moderate salt and drought tolerance. A nitrogen fixer, it will thrive even in poor soils. Foliage, bruised in strong winds, may emit a somewhat unpleasant odor. Plant it downwind.

Native to Taiwan and the Philippine Islands; in Hawaii widely cultivated and now naturalized in dry to mesic, disturbed areas, 3-915 m, on all of the main islands except Niihau. Introduced about 1915 by the Board of Agriculture and Forestry and the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (Degener, 1937b).

Distribution    
Native to Taiwan and the Philippine Islands. In the Hawaiian Islands, naturalized on Kaua`i, O`ahu, Moloka`i, Maui, Hawai`i.    

Habit
    Trees up to 15 m tall.

Leaves
    Leaves reduced to phyllodes, these narrowly elliptic, slightly falcate, 6-11 cm long, 0.5-0.8 cm wide.

Flowers
    Flowers ca. 2 mm long, in solitary axillary heads ca. 5 mm in diameter (excl. stamens), peduncles ca. 1 cm long; corolla yellow; stamens ca. 3 mm long; ovary glabrous.

Fruit
    Pods oblong in outline, flattened, 5-10 cm long, 0.7-1 cm wide, sutures partly constricted between all or most seeds, especially in younger stages.

Seeds
    Seeds lenticular, ca. 5 mm in diameter.
    
Chromosomes
    2n = 26

Small tree, adult foliage of falcate phyllodes, juvenile and sucker-shoot foliage of bipinnate leaves; trunk up to 1 m thick in very old trees; phyllodes alternate, coriaceous, parallel-curving-veined, 8-10 cm long, narrowed at both ends; flowers yellow, in small globose heads 6-8 mm in diameter; heads 1 or 2 in axil of phyllode; pods few together, linear or somewhat curved, flat or slightly twisted, brown, 5-10 cm long, 1 cm broad or a little more or less, with about 8 seeds; seeds compressed, brown.