Description :

• Shrubs, subshrubs or perennial herbs, often aromatic, silky villous, pubescent or glabrate
• Leaves alternate, pinnatisect, lobed, dentate or occasionally entire
• Capitula disciform or discoid, in terminal corymbs, rarely solitary, on long peduncles
• Involucre campanulate or subglobose; bracts in several rows
• Receptacle convex or ovoid-conical, epaleate or rarely with few marginal paleae
• Marginal florets female, fertile, generally stalked; corolla tubular, compressed, 3- or 4-toothed; or filiform, shorter than style, 2- or 3-fid; or scarcely developed
• Disc florets bisexual, fertile, or inner functionally male; corolla tubular, somewhat compressed or bluntly 4-angled, sometimes dilated above, 4-toothed
• Anthers ecalcarate and ecaudate, with suborbicular or ovate apical appendage
• Style branches linear, truncate, minutely penicillate
• Cypselas oblong-obovate, somewhat compressed or angled in female florets; in disc florets somewhat compressed, 3- or 4-angled, sometimes keeled or narrowly winged; glabrous or hairy, sometimes glandular
• Pappus 0

Nomenclature:

• Schistostephium Less.
  • Lessing: 251 (1832)
  • Harvey: 168 (1865)
  • Hutchinson: 99 (1916)
  • Hilliard: 357 (1977)
  • Bremer & Humphries: 160 (1993)
  • Bremer: 477 (1994)
• Peyrousea DC.
  • Candolle: 76 (1838)
  • Bremer: 493 (1977)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 12, south-tropical Africa
• Southern Africa : Species 9, Northern Province, North-West, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape and eastern part of Western Cape