Description :

• Perennial herbs, rarely annual
• Leaves slender-petiolate, radical ones often simple, ovate, cordate, entire or toothed and in succession upwards becoming divided and pinnate
• Flowers in compound umbels; involucral bracts few or absent, rarely many
• Calyx with or without teeth
• Petals obovate or elliptic, inflexed at apex, glabrous, hirsute or villous
• Disc cushion-shaped or conical
• Stamens longer than petals; filaments terete; anthers oblong, slightly divided above
• Styles longer than disc, terete; stigmas subcapitate
• Fruit ovate in outline or broader than long, slightly laterally flattened, glabrous or hairy, crowned with disc and styles; mericarps flat on face, convex on back, 5-ribbed; oil ducts ± 9, 2 or more in each furrow, 2 on inner face; carpophore 2-fid or 2-partite
• Seeds semiterete
• x = 9, 10 (8, 11) (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Pimpinella L.
  • Linnaeus: 263 (1753)
  • Sonder: 538 (1862)
  • Wolff: 219 (1927)
  • Townsend: 759 (1985)
  • Burtt: 240 (1991)
  • Pimenov & Leonov: 90 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 150, ± cosmopolitan
• Southern Africa : Species 7, northern and eastern parts and southwards to Uniondale and Humansdorp in the Eastern Cape