Description :

• Spreading, medium to tall shrubs, some with coppice shoots sprouting from underground lignotubers after fires
• Leaves ovate to linear, with a short petiole; often with prominent variation in length on a plant; stipules absent; bud leaf colleter brown, acute to acuminate, later shrinking to a minute black semicone or ridge
• Flowers in racemose or cymose panicles; floral receptacle trigonous to obconic, slightly to densely warty
• Calyx : tube minute; segments broadly ovate to oblong, papery, lacking a dark tip
• Corolla pale cream; petals free to lightly adnate to filaments, obovate to elliptic, with fleshy crests on adaxial surfaces of petal bases
• Stamens with a basal fleshy crest; anther thecae partly free; pollen with 4 or 5 colpi
• Nectary 0 to present as a pale ring around top of ovary, either low and fleshy or erect and laminate; scent not recorded
• Ovary almost to fully inferior; locules 1 or 2, if 2 then wall between locules complete to partly so; ovules 1 or 2 per locule; styles 1 or 2, if 2, then lightly connate, then branching, with branches divergent; if style single then erect to curved
• Fruit mostly unknown, globose, with or without warts
• Seeds unknown
• x = 11 (1 report)

Nomenclature:

• Pseudobaeckea Nied.
  • Niedenzu: 136 (1891)
  • Pillans: 169 (1947)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa : Species 3, Western Cape, mainly in southwest, extending to Uitenhage (S Eastern Cape)