Vegetable hummingbird

• Food: the (usually white) flowers are cooked in sour soup, stir-fried or made into salad — a signature vegetable of Vietnam's Mekong Delta; young leaves and pods are eaten as greens; flowers are also fried (agathi keerai in India)
• Agriculture: a nitrogen-fixing soil improver grown in intercrops; leaves and pods as fodder; stems as firewood
• Materials & landscape: bark yields coarse fibre (rope, netting); grown as an ornamental for its showy white/pink flowers that attract birds
• Folk medicine & safety: leaves, bark and flowers used traditionally for colds, fever and diarrhoea; the seeds are mildly toxic and must not be eaten

Form

Small tree/shrub

Product

Edible flowers, young leaves and pods

Hallmark

Hummingbird-shaped flowers; pods 20–60 cm long

Uses

Vegetable, soil improvement, fodder

Vegetable hummingbird prefers a hot, humid tropical or subtropical climate and grows fast on many soils, including poor ones, along rivers, ponds and canals, on wasteland and farmland; it tolerates short waterlogging and mild drought. Native to India and Southeast Asia; widely planted across the tropics including South China, Taiwan, the Pacific islands and tropical America and Africa.

Not individually assessed by IUCN but widely cultivated across the tropics and not threatened; regarded as Least Concern (LC). Legume family (Fabaceae), genus Sesbania — the same family as tamarind, golden shower tree and other legumes.