Ventilago Gaertn.

Lianes or climbing shrubs (or small trees but not in Africa). Tendrils absent. Branchlets often zig-zag. Leaves alternate, petiolate; blades serrulate or crenulate or nearly entire, elliptic or more elongate, usually rounded at base, acute, acuminate or obtuse, penninerved with the tertiary nerves often rather elegantly percurrent. Stipules minute, subulate, caducous. Flowers 5-merous, perfect, half-epigynous, usually in very densely crowded divaricate axillary cymes (these so condensed as to appear like nodal glomerules), or sometimes the leaves so reduced and the upper branches so crowded that these smaller inflorescences are borne in thyrses or panicles, or very rarely the flowers solitary in the axils. Sepals deltoid. Petals usually clawed and the body concave, cucullate (or absent but not in African species). Disk thick, adnate to the lower (fertile) half of the ovary, later somewhat accrescent and along with the cup fused to the basal sixth to half of the fruit-body (not the wing). Ovary 2-celled (but only 1 cell fertile), half-inferior, the superior moiety (or perhaps better called the style) expanding to hundreds of times its anthetic size in the form of an elongate terminal strap-like wing the plane of which bisects the 2 original ovary cells and which at the tip carries the 2 minute persistent styles. Fruit dry, samara-like, with a basal 1-celled thinly double-walled nearly spherical body, a single small seed and an elongate terminal wing.

Ventilago viminalis is used as a stock fodder in drought, and as a medicine by Indigenous people.