Description :

• Slender annual or perennial herbs, often with fragile, sprawling stems, usually freely branched, sometimes rooting from nodes
• Leaves opposite, sessile or petiolate, flat or very rarely subulate; stipules 0
• Inflorescences axillary, lax dichasial cymes, rarely flowers solitary; bracts membranous or herbaceous
• Flowers bisexual or rarely gynodioecious, hypogynous or subperigynous, small, honeyed
• Sepals 5, rarely 4, free, with scarious margins, persistent
• Petals (0)4-5, usually very deeply bifid, rarely 5-10-cleft, white
• Stamens (3-)5(-10), ± perigynous, arising and dehiscing in 2 sets
• Disc annular, elongating or of 5 interstaminal glands
• Ovary 1-locular; ovules many on free-central placenta; styles (2)3(4 or 5), episepalous
• Fruit a capsule, spherical or oblong, short, dehiscent by 6, rarely 4, 8 or 10 valves
• Seeds many, rarely few or one, compressed, granulate, roundish-reniform; embryo annular
• x = 13 (9, 10, 11, 12) (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Stellaria L.
  • Linnaeus: 421 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 193 (1754)
  • Jussieu: 301 (1789)
  • Sonder: 130 (1860)
  • Pax: 79 (1889)
  • Burtt Davy: 51 (1926)
  • Pax & Hoffmann: 320 (1934)
  • Turrill: 24 (1956)
  • Wild: 349 (1961)
  • Chater & Heywood: 133 (1964)
  • Henderson & Anderson: 142 (1966)
  • Wild, Hooper & Diniz: 11 (1973)
  • Friedrich: 883 (1979)
  • Bittrich: 227 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 150-200, mainly in Eurasia, with a centre of distribution in the mountains of East Central Asia, some species in afromontane Africa, some species with cosmopolitan distribution
• Southern Africa : Species 3, introduced, widespread weeds of cultivation, Namibia, Botswana, Northern Province, North-West, Gauteng, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Western and Eastern Cape