Description :

• Grey- or white-woolly annual or perennial herbs; stems few to many from crown, prostrate, ascending or erect, simple or branched, leafy
• Leaves alternate, small to medium-sized, oblanceolate or spathulate, apex subacute or obtuse, base much narrowed, petiole-like, margins flat, entire, both surfaces thinly or thickly grey- or white-woolly (hair type B), eglandular
• Capitula disciform, or discoid in 1 species, very small, few or many in woolly glomerules subcorymbosely arranged at branchlet tips
• Involucral bracts in (2)3-5 rows, backs woolly, inner bracts subequal, ± equalling or exceeding flowers; stereome divided in upper half, lower part concave, embracing adjacent flower, lamina thin, pellucid, sometimes purplish above stereome, tip opaque white, obtuse or rounded, radiating
• Receptacle nearly smooth, epaleate
• Florets 10-40, yellow, often tipped red; female flowers (0)1-30, either fewer than, ± equalling, or up to 10 times as many as bisexual florets, narrowly tubular or filiform; bisexual florets tubular, scarcely widened above with 5 deltoid lobes markedly mamillate on outer surface except in 1 species, glandular hairs with biseriate stalk and small 2-celled globular head on backs of all lobes
• Anthers ecalcarate, caudate, tails ± equalling or exceeding filament collar; with small obtuse apical appendage; endothecial tissue polarised
• Style branches truncate and penicillate, with obtuse sweeping hairs
• Cypselas oblong, wall smooth or nearly so or cells imbricate, oblong duplex hairs with swelling cushion frequently present, often myxogenic
• Pappus bristles subplumose in upper part with clavate hairs, delicate patent cilia at base, cohering or not

Nomenclature:

• Vellereophyton Hilliard & B.L.Burtt
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 210 (1981)
  • Hilliard: 31 (1983)
  • Anderberg: 168 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 364 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa : Species 7, endemic, Northern, Western and Eastern Cape
  • One species naturalised in Australia and New Zealand