Description :

• Shrubby perennial; branches closely leafy
• Leaves alternate, lanceolate, margins entire, sessile, bases decurrent in long narrow wings, green above drying grey, with thin skin-like indumentum, white-tomentose below (hair type B)
• Capitula disciform, cylindric, in small terminal clusters, often further aggregated into spreading corymbose panicle
• Involucral bracts in several rows, imbricate, graded, inner ones with stereome undivided, tips shortly exceeding flowers, radiating, opaque milk-white or occasionally pink
• Receptacle flat, paleate; paleae resembling inner involucral bracts
• Florets 17-26, 3-11 female, corolla purple, narrowly tubular or filiform; 10-17 bisexual, outnumbering female flowers, corolla purple, tubular below, campanulate above, 5-lobed, all lobes with glandular hairs on backs
• Anthers ecalcarate, caudate, tails shorter or longer than filament collar; with lanceolate apical appendage; endothecial tissue polarised
• Style branches with slightly rounded tips, with short, obtuse, sweeping hairs extending briefly down backs
• Cypselas oblong, with elongate duplex hairs with basal swelling cushion, myxogenic
• Pappus bristles scabrid above, cilia ± fused, shaft scabridulous, base nude, not cohering, caducous

Nomenclature:

• Tenrhynea Hilliard & B.L.Burtt
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 232 (1981)
  • Hilliard: 57 (1983)
  • Anderberg: 140 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 363 (1994)
• Rhynea DC.
  • Candolle: 154 (1838), not of Scop.
  • Harvey: 204 (1865)
  • Hilliard: 134 (1977)
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 374 (1973)
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 196 (1981)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa : Monotypic: Tenrhynea phylicifolia (DC.) Hilliard & B.L.Burtt, endemic, Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape