Description :

• Annual or rarely perennial herbs, hemiparasitic or holoparasitic on roots, sometimes drying dark, usually scabrid; stems simple or branched, rarely tufted, erect, sometimes rigid, usually quadrangular, often ridged
• Leaves opposite or upper ones alternate, sessile or subsessile, usually erect, often scale-like especially near stem base, sometimes throughout, otherwise usually narrow, entire, rarely dentate, usually scabrid
• Flowers solitary in axils of upper leaves or bracts, spicate, sometimes dense and/or elongating in fruit
• Bracts leaf-like or reduced; bracteoles 2
• Calyx tubular, 5-cleft or 5-dentate, 5-15-ribbed; tube cylindrical to campanulate; lobes sometimes unequal, usually erect, sometimes with membranous margins
• Corolla tubular, usually bilabiate and glandular, 5(4)-lobed; tube narrowly cylindrical, rather sharply bent at or above middle and often dilated there, mouth small, bearded; limb expanded; upper lip erect or recurved, entire (lobes fused), emarginate or bifid, interior in bud; lower lip 3-lobed, usually longer than upper one, spreading
• Stamens 4, didynamous, arising in upper part of corolla tube, included; filaments linear, short, sometimes shorter than the unithecate, basifixed, erect anthers
• Nectary present at base of ovary
• Ovary bilocular, elongated, ellipsoid or ovate; ovules many; style linear or terete, included, usually persistent; stigma somewhat thickened or clavate, sometimes bifid
• Fruit a cylindrical or subovoid, loculicidal capsule, enclosed in calyx
• Seeds minute, obovoid or oblong, with prominent encircling ridges; testa reticulate, membranous
• x = 10 (11, 12) (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Striga Lour.
  • Loureiro: 22 (1790)
  • Bentham: 968 (1876)
  • Hiern: 379 (1904)
  • Hemsley & Skan: 399 (1906)
  • Wild: 330 (1954)
  • Henderson & Anderson: 290 (1966)
  • Merxmüller & Roessler: 41 (1967)
  • Visser: 82, 160, tt. 171-184 (1981)
  • Hepper: 127 (1990)
  • Mielcarek: 174 (1996)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 40, Africa, Asia, Australia, introduced in N America
• Southern Africa : Species ± 7, widespread, but mostly in eastern half, not in Western Cape; often pestilential in cereal crops