Description :

• Annual or perennial, trailing or scrambling, prostrate, shade-loving; culms slender and weak, often with aerial roots from nodes
• Leaf blade broadly linear to ovate, expanded, often minutely cross-veined; ligule a short, fringed membrane or a fringe of hairs
• Inflorescence of several 1-sided, spike-like racemes usually scattered and distant on slender central axis, racemes sometimes reduced to fascicles, rachis narrow; spikelets abaxial, solitary, paired, subsessile or shortly pedicelled
• Spikelet lanceolate to oblong, weakly laterally compressed to not noticeably or dorsiventrally compressed, falling with glumes; glumes ± equal, similar, shorter than spikelet, membranous, elliptic, 3-5-nerved, sometimes hairy, lower or both glumes long-awned from apex; awn of lower glume always longer
• Florets 2; lower floret male (rarely) or sterile; lemma acute or very shortly awned; palea usually 0; upper floret bisexual; lemma dorsally compressed, similar in texture to glumes, coriaceous, lanceolate to elliptic, entire, shortly apiculate or obtuse, glabrous, smooth, shining, margins inrolled and clasping palea, awnless; callus hairy; palea acute, relatively long, hyaline, 2-nerved
• Lodicules 2, broadly cuneate, often very delicate
• Stamens 3
• Ovary ellipsoid, glabrous; styles distinct, plumose
• Caryopsis oblong to ellipsoid
• x = 9, 10, 11 (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Oplismenus P.Beauv.
  • Palisot de Beauvois: 14 (1810)
  • Stapf: 415 (1899)
  • Stent: 271 (1924)
  • Chippindall: 362 (1955)
  • Launert: 132 (1970)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 541 (1982)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 271 (1986)
  • Clayton: 6 (1989)
  • Gibbs Russell et al.: 227 (1990)
  • Watson & Dallwitz: 663 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 5, tropics and subtropics
• Southern Africa : Species 3, Caprivi in Namibia, N Botswana, northern provinces of South Africa to Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape