Description :

• Annual or perennial herbs, often suffrutescent with annual stems from woody rootstocks, or small to large shrubs, woody scramblers or rarely small trees
• Leaves alternate, rarely opposite, sometimes radical, sessile or petiolate, linear to ovate, entire or lobed, penninerved, often glandular
• Capitula discoid, 1-many-flowered, capitula usually arranged in corymbiform cymes, sometimes scorpioidly cymose, or in various axillary or terminal clusters, spicate, paniculate or solitary and terminal
• Involucre cyathiform-campanulate, obconic, cylindric or hemispheric; bracts free, in 2-many rows, loosely or appressed imbricate; apices acute, obtuse or rounded, often mucronate or aristate
• Receptacle flat or convex, plane or alveolate; alveolae sometimes fimbriate; epaleate
• Florets normally bisexual and fertile; corolla creamy white, various shades of purple or blue; cylindric to narrowly infundibuliform or slender-tubular below and abruptly widened cylindric above; regularly 5-lobed
• Anthers calcarate, ecaudate or shortly caudate; with linear or lanceolate apical appendage
• Style branches long-tapering-subterete with stigmatic papillae on inner surface towards base, pilose or shortly hirsute outside, usually with sweeping hairs
• Cypselas subterete to ± laterally compressed, obpyramidal and 4- or 5-sided, oblong-obovoid, turbinate or subfusiform, 2-20-ribbed, sometimes smooth, sparsely to densely glandular, variously hairy or glabrous, with or without distinct basal callus
• Pappus usually in 2 rows with outer row of short scales or setae, sometimes caducous; inner whorl of long, barbellate or subplumose, sometimes caducous, whitish purple or green setae, more rarely outer pappus 0
• x = 9, 10, 17 (8, 11, 12, 19) (aneuploids, polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• Vernonia Schreb
  • Schreber: 541 (1791)
  • Harvey: 48 (1865)
  • Hilliard: 25 (1977)
  • Pope: 57 (1992)
  • Bremer: 227 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species over 1000, fairly cosmopolitan
• Southern Africa : Species 40, widespread but absent from Western Cape