Description :

• Shrubs, erect to sprawling, some with coppice shoots sprouting from lignotubers after fires
• Leaves spiral to rarely opposite and decussate, generally minute, hard-textured and sessile, narrow, elliptic to ovate, glabrous to verruculose, margins and keel mostly narrowly hyaline or warty; stipules often present as minute dark papillae, later lost; bud leaf colleter a narrow papilla becoming a broadly triangular or semiconical apiculus, later shrinking to lost
• Flowers solitary and terminal on a branch with an involucre of ± 6-30 bracts; bracteoles 0; floral receptacle finely ribbed, sometimes extended above to form a hypanthium
• Calyx : sepals free, lanceolate to narrowly ovate
• Corolla white to pink or basally purple; petals free, spreading, clawed, sometimes with crests next to ovary
• Stamens free from corolla; anthers slender; pollen grains with 3-5 colpi
• Nectary 0 to a thin to fleshy green collar; nectar and scent not recorded
• Ovary superior to half-inferior, with 1 or 2 locules; ovules 4-8, pendulous; wall between locules often incomplete at anthesis with placenta basal, free-central, axile, or a reduced placenta in summit of ovary; style erect, stigma solitary, obtuse to capitate or truncate
• Fruit ellipsoid to spheroidal or oblong

Nomenclature:

• Thamnea Sol. ex Brongn.
  • Brongniart: 386 (1826)
  • Sonder: 324 (1862)
  • Pillans: 143 (1947)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa : Species 7, Western Cape, mainly in the Ceres region