Description :

• Perennial herbs, spreading, glabrous, often forming clumps and usually emitting a strong smell of garlic when damaged; rootstock a corm or rhizome, bearing many thick roots
• Leaves 4-8, deciduous or evergreen according to climate, frequently distichous, several per shoot, basal, linear to lorate, soft, glossy, acute, bases tubular, persistent, forming a long sheathing neck
• Inflorescence a 3-40-flowered umbel; scape solitary and erect
• Flowers usually opening in succession, small, occasionally sweet-scented, marcescent, splitting sideways; umbel enclosed in bud by 2 acuminate, persistent (afterwards reflexed) spathes; bracts filiform; pedicels erect
• Perianth united into a tube for ± half its length, with a swollen annular or lobed corona at mouth, or with 3 separate, ovate appendages arising at base of inner perianth lobes; lobes spreading-recurved, usually shorter than tube, mostly dull-coloured, green, brown, white or mauve, with or without a yellow or orange corona
• Stamens biseriate, sessile; anthers dorsifixed, included and attached to tube
• Ovary ovoid; with few to many ovules; style very short, columnar; stigma capitate; nectaries on septa
• Fruit surrounded by marcescent perianth
• Seeds triangular, shiny
• x = 6

Nomenclature:

• Tulbaghia L.
  • Linnaeus: 148 (1771)
  • Baker: 403 (1897)
  • Sölch & Roessler: 14 (1969)
  • Vosa: 47 (1975)
  • Burbidge: 77 (1978)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 20, Africa; mostly southern Africa
• Southern Africa : Widespread in all countries and provinces