Description :

• Annuals or perennials (often chamaephytes), variously hispid and often glandular-pubescent
• Leaves linear to narrowly ovate, usually serrate or lobulate to deeply incised; stipules small or 0
• Flowers in simple, secund, few- to many-flowered racemes with apical part recurved in bud, accrescent and erect with age, flowers developing one after the other; scape long and thin; pedicels short, somewhat accrescent and often recurved in fruit; bracts small; a few sterile bracts often present on rachis
• Calyx usually setiferous on outside, pubescent in lower half inside
• Petals obovate, unguiculate, yellow, orange-red or white; claw appressed to calyx tube in upper half, fused to it below; with a ligule or small pustule on upper part of claw
• Stamens hypogynous, reaching to throat; filaments filiform, sometimes narrowly winged, occasionally 3 shorter; anthers oblong
• Ovary ellipsoid; styles erect, heterostylous; stigmas apical, small, multipartite
• Capsule resembling a siliqua of Brassicaceae , terete, usually long and thin, often constricted between the uniseriate seeds, rostrate
• Seeds straight, terete, obtuse, reticulate, usually with 2 pores in each cavity; aril unilateral, short

Nomenclature:

• Tricliceras Thonn. ex DC.
  • Candolle: 56 (1826)
  • Fernandes: 15 (1975)
  • Obermeyer: 453 (1978)
• Wormskioldia Thonn.
  • Thonning: 165 (1827)
  • Schreiber: 3 (1968)
  • Obermeyer: 93 (1976)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 11, tropical and subtropical Africa
• Southern Africa : Species 7, in Namibia, Botswana, Northern Province, North-West, Mpumalanga, Kwa­Zulu-Natal and Eastern Cape