Description :

• Annual or perennial herbs, suffrutices or shrubs
• Leaves simple, lobed or digitately divided, serrate or crenate, often several-nerved from base; stipules lateral
• Flowers borne in cymes in terminal inflorescences or at nodes
• Sepals 5, usually linear and with a short horn just behind the apex, usually stellately hairy without
• Petals 5, linear to obovate, narrowed towards base, often hairy at base or just above it, yellow or orange
• Stamens 4-40, raised on a short, glabrous androgynophore or torus with a glandular patch just above each petal base, apex of androgynophore produced into a ciliate or pubescent or villous disc or annulus between which and the ovary stamens arise
• Ovary often tubercled or echinulate, each tubercle surmounted by one or more minute bristles; 2-5-locular with 2 pendulous collateral ovules in each locule or falsely 10-locular by the intrusion of longitudinal false septa; style terete, ± as long as stamens; stigma entire or very shortly 2-5-lobed
• Fruit a usually globose, sometimes ovoid, echinate or setose capsule, indehiscent or dividing into 2-5 valves with 1 or 2 seeds per locule
• Seeds obovoid or subreniform; testa rather leathery and brown; embryo straight; cotyledons flat, suborbicular; endosperm fleshy, scanty
• x = 8 (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Triumfetta L.
  • Linnaeus: 444 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 203 (1754)
  • Candolle: 506 (1824)
  • Harvey: 227 (1860)
  • Wild: 63 (1963)
  • Wild: 20 (1984)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 100, widely distributed in the tropics and subtropics but particularly common in Africa
• Southern Africa : Species 10, Namibia, Botswana, Northern Province, North-West, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho and Eastern Cape
  • Many species are weeds of cultivation and waste places and early colonisers of fallows or abandoned cultivation; others are frequent in forest clearings and forest margins; many are used for the production of native fibres