Description :

• Herbs, subshrubs or shrubs, sometimes aquatic herbs
• Leaves generally opposite, at least below, sometimes alternate throughout or rosulate; entire or serrate-dentate to pinnatisect or lobed, often trinerved, often scabrid with multiseptate hairs or woolly hairs or glabrous
• Capitula radiate, discoid or rarely disciform, solitary or in variously arranged synflorescences
• Involucral bracts in 1-3, sometimes many, rows; generally herbaceous, sometimes scarious, chartaceous, membranous or foliaceous, sometimes distinctly dimorphic or with scarious margins
• Receptacle paleate, paleae flat or often conduplicate, membranous or with herbaceous, or rarely lignified-pungent tip, deciduous or persistent
• Ray florets generally female and fertile, sometimes sterile or neuter, usually yellow, sometimes white, rarely pink, red or purple
• Disc florets bisexual or functionally male, generally with narrow tube and expanding limb, shallowly 5-lobed, sometimes shallowly 4-lobed, generally yellow, rarely white, purplish or greenish; lobes frequently papillose adaxially
• Anthers shortly calcarate, ecaudate, usually blackish, sometimes pale, rarely reddish, greenish or yellowish; apical appendage generally ovate to cordate, concave, acute, sometimes truncate to emarginate or acuminate, often glandular; endothecial tissue usually polarised, rarely radial; filament collar generally broadened towards base, dilated, sometimes continuous around filament
• Style with oblong-linear style branches, generally with sterile appendages of ± fused hairs or sometimes truncate and apically penicillate; hairs obtuse; stigmatic areas in 2 separate lines or sometimes with continuous stigmatic areas
• Cypselas brown to blackish, usually with short to long twin hairs, sometimes glabrous; ray cypselas generally triquetrous, sometimes dorsiventrally compressed and then generally with multiseptate hairs, or rarely laterally compressed; disc cypselas angular or laterally compressed and ± enclosed by subtending paleae, sometimes dorsiventrally compressed
• Pappus of stout to fragile awns, scales and/or barbellate to plumose bristles, rarely coroniform or sometimes 0

Nomenclature:

• Heliantheae
  • Cassini: 189 (1819)
  • Karis & Ryding: 578 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Genera 189, worldwide but mainly in North and South America
• Southern Africa : Genera 25, species 46, mostly naturalised weeds

References:

• CASSINI, A.H.G. DE. 1819. In Journal de physique, de chimie, d'histoire naturelle et des artes 88
• HILLIARD, O.M. 1977. Compositae in Natal . University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg
• KARIS, P.O. & RYDING, O. 1994. Tribes Helenieae and Heliantheae . In K. Bremer, Asteraceae , cladistics and classification . Timber Press, Portland, Oregon
• WILD, H. 1967. The Compositae of the Flora zambesiaca area, 1. Kirkia 6

Resources:

• Key to Asteraceae tribes
• Key to Heliantheae genera

• Heliantheae genera: