Description:

• Perennial, rarely annual or biennial, erect or spreading herbs, undershrubs or shrubs, roughly canescent or hispid
• Leaves alternate, usually sessile, linear to lanceolate, entire
• Flowers in leafy terminal or axillary, helicoid cymes
• Calyx with shallow tube; 5-lobed to more than halfway, lobes linear to lanceolate, usually much shorter than corolla tube
• Corolla yellow, orange or white; tube subcampanulate with 5 hairy cushions in throat opposite lobes or with 5 folds intruded from outer surface; lobes 5, shorter than tube, imbricate in bud, ovate, obovate or semicircular
• Stamens: filaments arising near middle of corolla tube, included; anthers longer than filaments
• Disc a ring of nectaries, lobes or small hairs
• Ovary 4-lobed, 4-locular, with a solitary ovule in each locule; gynobase disc-like; style gynobasic, filiform, simple or slightly 2-fid, included or exserted; stigmas 2, terminal or situated just below 2-fid apex of style, usually globose
• Fruit of 4 nutlets; nutlets white, shiny, bony, ovoid or ellipsoid, convex on back, keeled on face
• x = 7 (8, 6) (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Lithospermum L.
  • Linnaeus: 132 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 64 (1754)
  • Candolle: 73 (1846)
  • Bentham: 860 (1876)
  • Boissier: 216 (1879)
  • Gürke: 118 (1897)
  • Wright: 20 (1904)
  • Riedl: 148 (1967)
  • Taton: 56 (1971)
  • Martins: 108 (1990)
  • Al-Shehbaz: 119 (1991)
  • Verdcourt: 77 (1991)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 45, mainly in temperate regions of both hemispheres, particularly in Mexico and North America
• Southern Africa: Species 9, not recorded from Botswana and Western Cape