Description :

• Perennial, decumbent herb
• Leaves usually small and soft, entire or toothed
• Inflorescences racemose, lax or dense; bracts leaf-like, often smaller towards apex of inflorescence; verticils 2-flowered
• Calyx pouch-shaped, 2-lipped; lips equal in length, entire, broad, rounded, upper bearing a transverse protruding outgrowth and finally deciduous, lower persistent
• Corolla 2-lipped; tube ascending-arcuate or somewhat sigmoid, upper lip erect, concave or galeate, usually obliquely joined to lateral lobes of lower lip; lower lip spreading with an oblong central lobe and 2 smaller lateral lobes
• Stamens 4, didynamous, ascending under upper lip and included by it, lower pair the longer; anthers of upper pair 2-thecous, of the lower with one theca imperfect or obsolete
• Ovary on variably developed gynobase; style slender, included in upper lip, subequal to stamens, apex subulate with one branch wanting or short and appressed to the longer
• Nutlets ovoid to subglobose, rarely obovoid, borne on a raised gynophore, tuberculate or variously sculptured
• x = 11, 17 (7, 10, 12, 13, 15) (aneuploids, B-chromosomes, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Scutellaria L.
  • Linnaeus: 598 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 260 (1754)
  • Bentham: 412 (1848)
  • Bentham: 1201 (1876)
  • Briquet: 225 (1896)
  • Baker: 461 (1900)
  • Richardson: 135 (1972)
  • Codd: 17 (1985)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 300, cosmopolitan
• Southern Africa : Species 1: * Scutellaria racemosa Pers. of South American origin, is naturalised in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal