Description :

• Annual or perennial herbs, glabrous or more often clothed with simple or stellate hairs
• Leaves entire, toothed, sinuate or more rarely pinnatifid
• Flowers small, solitary, axillary, violet, yellow or white, often purple at base
• Calyx campanulate or pyramidal, 5-lobed shortly or to the middle, enlarged in fruit, inflated, membranous, 5-angled or prominently 10-ribbed, often 5-auricled at base; teeth conniving
• Corolla subrotate or very widely campanulate, 5-angled or shortly and widely 5-lobed
• Stamens 5, arising near corolla base; filaments filiform; anthers erect, usually shorter than filaments; thecae parallel, dehiscing longitudinally
• Ovary 2-locular; style filiform; stigma shortly 2-lobed; ovules many
• Fruit a globose berry, enclosed in and much smaller than inflated calyx
• Seeds few or many, smooth or slenderly tuberculate-rugose, compressed; embryo near margin, curved; cotyledons semiterete
• x = 12 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Physalis L.
  • Linnaeus: 182 (1753)
  • Wright: 105 (1904)
  • Henderson & Anderson: 272 (1966)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 80, mostly New World
• Southern Africa : Species ± 7, naturalised