Description :

• Erect, robust or rarely soft, trailing, annual or rarely perennial herbs, simple or sparsely branched, usually somewhat fleshy and ± covered with mucilage glands
• Leaves opposite, long-petiolate; lamina broad, ovate to rhombic or cordate, sometimes ± 3-lobed, margins ± sinuate to coarsely dentate, veins digitate at base, elsewhere pinnate, mealy-glandular beneath
• Nectaries extrafloral, present at base of petioles and pedicels
• Flowers single or few in axillary cymes on short pedicels; usually violet, pink, cream or white, often with darker throat
• Calyx small, much shorter than corolla tube, persistent, becoming hard and spiny in fruit; tube shallowly saucer-shaped; lobes ovate or lanceolate, often unequal
• Corolla : tube slightly gibbous to saccate on posterior side of base, then cylindric, becoming campanulate above, usually somewhat curved; limb sub-bilabiate, spreading, lobes suborbicular to obovate
• Stamens didynamous, usually arising low down in corolla tube, sometimes further up, included or slightly exserted; filaments filiform to broadly linear, long, pilose at base; anthers with thecae dorsifixed, parallel but at length divergent; staminodes 0 or 1
• Nectary shallow, adnate to base of ovary
• Ovary ovoid or elongate-conical, sometimes glabrous below, densely glandular above, unequally 2-locular, falsely 4-locular; anticous locules with many ovules in 3-5 rows, posterior locules with few ovules, in 1 row; style terete, slightly exserted; stigma of 2 unequal, lanceolate lobes
• Fruit a chartaceous to woody, obliquely ovoid or lanceolate, beaked capsule, often curved at apex, slightly gibbous at base or armed with 2-8 tubercles or conical, spreading or recurved spines below middle; loculicidal almost to base or anterior locule tardily loculicidal to middle or lower, and posterior locule indehiscent
• Seeds ± obovate to oblong, not winged, dark; testa of each face finely punctate or with large pits in reticulate pattern; narrow, marginal wing more finely reticulate; sometimes oily
• x = 8 (1 report, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Rogeria J.Gay ex Delile
  • Delile: 78, t. 2 (1826)
  • Stapf: 459 (1904)
  • Stapf: 548 (1906)
  • Andrews: 160 (1956)
  • De Winter: 106 (1961)
  • Ihlenfeldt: 43. t. 9 (1967a)
  • Ihlenfeldt: 605 (1967b)
  • Merxmüller & Schreiber: 6 (1968)
  • Ihlenfeldt: 1063 (1994)
  • Nel: 111 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 6, Africa and 1 in Brazil
• Southern Africa : Species 4, Namibia and Northern Cape (Namaqualand and Griqualand West)