Description :

• Perennial herbs or subshrubs; stems long, slender, tangled, thinly white-tomentose, leafy
• Leaves alternate, small, elliptic to suborbicular, apex obtuse or rounded, sessile or shortly petiolate, margins entire, flat or undulate, upper surface generally cobwebby (hair type B), glabrescent, lower white-tomentose
• Capitula disciform, small, many in small compact corymbose clusters terminating branchlets
• Involucral bracts in 3 or 4 rows, inner ± equalling or slightly exceeding florets, tips opaque white, obtuse, radiating; stereome undivided
• Receptacle shortly honeycombed, flat, epaleate
• Florets ± 10-40, female flowers 3-30, fewer to more than bisexual flowers, narrowly tubular or filiform; bisexual flowers tubular below, slightly expanded above with 5 deltoid lobes, glandular hairs on backs of all lobes; corolla yellow sometimes tipped pink or purple
• Anthers ecalcarate, caudate, tails either shorter or slightly longer than filament collar; with small obtuse or subacute deltoid apical appendage; endothecial tissue polarised
• Style branches truncate and penicillate, short obtuse sweeping hairs extending briefly down backs of branches
• Cypselas small, oblong, wall flat, apparently without crystals, oblong duplex hairs with swelling cushion always present, myxogenic
• Pappus bristles scabrid above, bases cohering by patent cilia, lightly fused as well in 1 species; cells with delicate wall thickenings

Nomenclature:

• Plecostachys Hilliard & B.L.Burtt
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 206 (1981)
  • Hilliard: 49 (1983)
  • Anderberg: 140 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 362 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa : Species 2, endemic: Plecostachys polifolia (Thunb.) Hilliard & B.L.Burtt and P. serpyllifolia (P.J.Bergius) Hilliard & B.L.Burtt, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape