Description :

• Perennial, mat-forming, acaulescent herbs, woolly, with stout rootstocks
• Leaves radical, sessile or narrowed into petiole, entire, toothed or pinnatifid, lower surface whitish-woolly
• Capitula radiate, many-flowered, solitary, terminal, peduncled
• Involucre campanulate; bracts in few to many rows, scarious-hyaline on margins
• Receptacle flat or convex, epaleate
• Ray florets female, fertile; corolla yellow, strap-shaped; tube pilose at base, with ± linear-oblong, 3-toothed lamina, 3-5 times longer than tube; staminodes sometimes present
• Disc florets many, bisexual; corolla yellow, infundibuliform, deeply 5-lobed
• Anthers sagittate at base
• Style abruptly thickened below branches; branches connate or minutely bifid
• Cypselas turbinate, ribbed, glabrous, minutely pubescent or silky-villous, with basal coma of long or short hairs
• Pappus in 2 to several rows occasionally reduced or 0; inner pappus of delicate, hyaline, lanceolate scales equalling corolla tube in length; outer pappus smaller
• x = 5, 6, 9 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Haplocarpha Less.
  • Lessing: 90 (1831)
  • Oliver & Hiern: 427 (1877)
  • Beauverd: 50 (1915)
  • Lewin: 50 (1922)
  • Phillips: 843 (1951)
  • Hilliard: 537 (1977)
  • Pope: 232 (1992)
  • Bremer: 260 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 10, Africa
• Southern Africa : Species 5, widespread, absent from Namibia and Botswana