Description :

• Perennial herbs with prostrate stems, or ± virgate subshrubs
• Leaves subsessile or shortly petiolate, rarely undeveloped
• Flowers in pedunculate or subsessile clusters or umbels, lateral at nodes
• Sepals lanceolate with scales within base, hairy
• Corolla : tube globose, 5-winged or -angled at base, then cylindric, hairy outside; lobes shorter than tube, linear, with reflexed margins, sometimes with minute, pocket-like thickenings at sinuses between them
• Corona arising at or near base of staminal column and almost as long as it, of 5 lobes; lobes halfmoon-shaped or transversely oblong, reflexed outwards or V-shaped
• Anthers 2-locular, with a subulate or lanceolate, membranous appendage
• Pollinia erect, oblong, with pellucid, apical patch, with short caudicles
• Follicles large, fusiform, acuminate, smooth
• Seeds brown, ovate with a narrow, marginal wing, convex on one face, flat on other; with tuft of hairs
• x = 11 (1 report)

Nomenclature:

• Orthanthera Wight
  • Wight 48 (1834)
  • Brown: 784 (1908)
  • Huber: 46 (1967)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 4, Africa and India
• Southern Africa : Species 2, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa excluding KwaZulu-Natal, Free State and Eastern Cape