A tall forest tree in the bean family, valued for its reddish heartwood, which is traded as a padouk-type timber and dye wood similar to camwood.
Pterocarpus osun (family Fabaceae), one of the trees known as camwood, is an evergreen or deciduous tree 12 to 30 metres tall with a spreading crown and a short trunk about 80 cm across, often crooked and sometimes slightly buttressed. It is a tree of local importance, supplying timber, tannins and medicines, and its very good wood is traded. Like many legumes, it fixes nitrogen through bacteria in its root nodules.
It grows in Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Congo, in mixed deciduous wet forest in the moist tropical lowlands, at 90 to 150 metres.
Source: Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.).
Bark and wood are a local source of tannins and traditional medicines; the powdered heartwood is also used cosmetically as a skin treatment, as with the related camwood species.
A forest tree of West and Central Africa, harvested from the wild for its valuable timber and dye-yielding heartwood.