Description :

• Annual or perennial herbs; stems often erect or ascending, sometimes decumbent to prostrate, simple or sparingly branched, leafy throughout or mainly at base, pubescent, hairs often acute, sometimes glandular
• Leaves opposite, often subopposite or alternate upwards, all radical or radical and cauline, mostly variously elliptical to ovate, sometimes lanceolate, oblanceolate or spathulate, rarely subrotund or rhomboid-ovate, entire to variously toothed, usually somewhat pubescent, sometimes glabrous, rarely villous
• Flowers ± sessile, in terminal spikes, often capitate or at least dense, sometimes lax, or becoming lax in fruit, erect
• Bracts adnate to calyx to varying degrees
• Calyx distinctly bilabiate, strongly 5-ribbed and plicate in flower, expanded in fruit; posterior lip 3-toothed; anterior lip usually 2-toothed, occasionally ± entire; lobes ± deltoid, pubescent at least on margins
• Corolla ± regular to sometimes bilabiate; tube long, narrow, cylindrical, only slightly expanded in throat, usually pubescent outside, glabrous inside but mouth often bearded with long, acute or clavate hairs; posterior lip exterior in bud; lobes rotate or reflexed (but cleistogamy not uncommon), either entire and variously shaped, or retuse, or Y-shaped and then once or twice bifid, usually glandular outside, glabrous inside or glandular, particularly near mouth
• Stamens 4 or 2 (anterior or posterior), didynamous, arising near apex of corolla tube; posterior pair with filaments decurrent to base of tube, forming a channel for style, included; anterior anthers usually smaller, often exserted or tips appearing in mouth; all anthers synthecate, dorsifixed; staminodes rarely present and never consistently so
• Nectary on shorter, posterior side of ovary base, either small, rounded, adnate to ovary, or peg-like and free
• Ovary bilocular, ± elliptical, tapering upwards into filiform style; ovules many per locule; stigma flattened, lingulate with 2 marginal bands of stigmatic papillae, often exserted
• Fruit a ± distinctly beaked septicidal capsule with a short loculicidal split at tip of each valve, usually glabrous, rarely a few minute glands at apex
• Seeds obscurely angled or distinctly, narrowly winged, pallid or mauve-grey, colliculate; testa thin, tightly investing endosperm
• x = 6

Nomenclature:

• Zaluzianskya F.W.Schmidt
  • Schmidt: 11 (1793) name conserved
  • Walpers: 306 (1844)
  • Hiern: 333 (1904)
  • Greuter et al.: 298 (1994), not of Necker
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 1 (1983)
  • Hilliard: 460 (1994)
• Nycterinia D.Don
  • Don: t. 239 (1834)
  • Bentham: 369 (1836)
  • Bentham: 348 (1846)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 55, tropical and southern Africa
• Southern Africa : Species 53, in all areas except Botswana, annual species concentrated in Western Cape, thinning out north- and eastwards, with 1 isolated on high mountains of East Africa; perennial species mainly in eastern regions, decreasing northwards
  • Reaching Zimbabwe and Mozambique