Description :

• Delicate annual or short-lived perennial herbs well-branched from base; stems filiform, prostrate, diffuse or weakly erect, thinly white-woolly, distantly leafy
• Leaves alternate, small, on filiform petioles; blade elliptic or ovate; margins flat, entire, both surfaces cobwebby or thinly woolly (hair type B), upper sometimes glabrescent
• Capitula discoid or disciform, small, on filiform peduncles racemosely or subcorymbosely arranged, or rarely nearly sessile and crowded
• Involucral bracts in 3(-5) rows, subequal, slightly exceeding flowers; stereome undivided or with 2 or 3 thin linear patches in upper part, lower part canaliculate, embracing adjacent flower; lamina delicate, pellucid, sometimes purplish above stereome, tip subopaque or opaque white, obtuse to subacute, either radiating or whole involucre rotating at maturity
• Receptacle shallowly tubercled, flat, epaleate
• Flowers 8-30, yellow, sometimes tipped pink; female flowers (0)2-23, fewer than, or ± equalling, or 2 or 3(-7) × as many as bisexual florets, narrowly tubular or filiform; bisexual flowers narrowly infundibuliform or tubular below, narrowly campanulate above, with 5 deltoid lobes, glandular hairs with biseriate stalk and small globular 2-celled head on backs of all lobes
• Anthers ecalcarate, caudate, tails shorter than, ± equalling, or slightly exceeding filament collar, with small obtuse apical appendage; endothecial tissue polarised
• Style branches truncate and penicillate, with obtuse sweeping hairs apically
• Cypselas oblong, wall with slightly raised cells, moderately imbricate or not, oblong duplex hairs with swelling cushion frequently present, apparently not always emitting mucilage (neither imbricate cells nor duplex hairs a specific character)
• Pappus bristles barbellate or subplumose above, these cilia ± clavate and with delicate wall thickenings, shaft markedly barbellate, bases cohering by patent cilia

Nomenclature:

• Troglophyton Hilliard & B.L.Burtt
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 208 (1981)
  • Hilliard: 39 (1983)
  • Anderberg: 168 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 364 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa : Species 6, endemic, Namibia, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern, Western and Eastern Cape