Description :

• Annual, rarely perennial herbs, often prostrate and rooting at nodes, often in damp places
• Leaves opposite, simple, ovate to linear, entire or sinuate, glabrous
• Capitula radiate, many-flowered, usually on long peduncles, terminal or axillary
• Involucre campanulate; bracts in 2 or 3 rows, outer membranous, shorter than receptacle
• Receptacle convex, sometimes elongated, paleate; paleae boat-shaped, enclosing florets
• Ray florets female, fertile; corolla yellow or white, strap-shaped; tube ± hairy, with elliptic, usually 2-lobed lamina somewhat longer than tube
• Disc florets bisexual, fertile; corolla yellow, tubular below, expanded above, 4- or 5-toothed
• Anthers with small, obtuse apical appendage, base obtuse or minutely sagittate
• Style branches of ray florets linear, of disc florets oblong, truncate, minutely penicillate
• Cypselas elliptic or obovate, 3- or 4-angled, ± compressed, margins hyaline or ciliate
• Pappus 0 or of 2 or 3 bristles
• x = 13 (6, 7, 9) (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Spilanthes Jacq.
  • Jacquin: 8 (1760)
  • Harvey: 133 (1865)
  • Phillips: 817 (1951)
  • Wild: 60 (1967)
  • Hilliard: 313 (1977)
  • Karis & Ryding: 587 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 6, pantropical
• Southern Africa : Species 2: * Spilanthes decumbens (Sm.) A.H.Moore, an introduced weed, known from KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape, and S. mauritiana (Pers.) DC., indigenous in the Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape