Description :

• Perennial herbs, erect, often robust, with tuberous rootstock or fusiform roots
• Leaves petiolate or subsessile, usually distinctly penninerved
• Flowers in 2-several-flowered umbels, lateral at nodes
• Sepals usually with scales within base, usually ciliate, often pilose
• Corolla usually deeply 5-lobed, sometimes with broadly campanulate tube
• Corona arising at or from near base of staminal column, of 5 lobes; lobes shorter to longer than staminal column or nearly as long as corolla, erect or deflexed or inflexed over style head, often shortly and thickly stalked, dorsally flattened, spatulate, oblong-spatulate, broadly ovate, obovate, oblong, sometimes bluntly 3-lobed or produced into a linear lobe, usually with 2 flaps on inner face, sometimes attached by a broad foot to staminal column and consisting of 2 fleshy keels separated by a deep, narrow fissure
• Anthers 2-locular, with membranous appendages usually resting on style head
• Pollinia oblong or ovate-oblong, pendulous, caudicles usually shorter than pollinia
• Style head crater-like, depressed-truncate or dome-like
• Follicles usually solitary by abortion, ± fusiform, obtuse, winged at least in upper part, sometimes toothed or echinate along wings
• Seeds brown, oblong, convex on back, concave on face with thickened margin, covered with short protuberances
• x = 11 (1 report)

Nomenclature:

• Pachycarpus E.Mey.
  • Meyer: 209 (1838)
  • Brown: 714 (1908)
  • Bullock: 329 (1953)
  • Smith: 399 (1988)
  • Goyder 338 (1998)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 30, Africa
• Southern Africa : Species 27, widespread, excluding Namibia and Botswana; in high grassveld