Description :

• Shrubs, subshrubs or perennial herbs, sometimes succulent, with thickened rootstock, usually glabrous
• Leaves alternate, sometimes radical, sessile or petiolate, varying from linear to orbicular, entire to serrate-dentate or pinnatifid
• Capitula radiate, disciform or discoid; many-flowered, solitary to corymbose or paniculate, terminal or axillary, on short or long peduncles
• Involucre ecalyculate, campanulate; bracts in 1 row, connate below, sometimes with membranous margin, glabrous
• Receptacle flat or convex, epaleate
• Marginal florets female or bisexual, fertile; corolla yellow, white, purple or pink; tube with obovate-elliptic to linear, blunt or 2- or 3-toothed lamina up to 4 times its length, sometimes short and truncate
• Disc florets functionally male; corolla yellow or whitish, tubular below, widened above, sometimes very short, with 5 ovate lobes
• Anthers ecalcarate and ecaudate or minutely sagittate at base; with ovate apical appendage; endothecial tissue radial
• Style of female flowers linear, with linear, obtuse branches, subacute; of fully fertile bisexual flowers truncate and penicillate with small cone-shaped apical appendage; of functionally male flowers undivided, penicillate, tipped with conical or globose appendage
• Cypselas mostly ellipsoid, glabrous or pubescent, ribbed
• Pappus of many persistent, rarely caducous, scabrid bristles
• x = 10 (polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• Othonna L.
  • Linnaeus: 924 (1753)
  • Harvey: 327 (1865)
  • Hilliard: 513 (1977)
  • Bremer: 506 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 120, Africa, mainly southern Africa
• Southern Africa : Namibia, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern, Western and Eastern Cape