Description:

• Annual herbs, slender, erect, glabrous, somewhat fleshy, sometimes aquatic, branching mainly at base
• Leaves opposite, crowded towards base of stem, becoming smaller, few and distant above, simple, linear-lanceolate, or oblong to ovate, entire, obscurely palmately veined
• Flowers solitary in axils of upper leaves, pedicellate, chasmogamous, or sometimes lower flowers sessile to subsessile, cleistogamous; pedicels filiform, ebracteolate
• Calyx tubular, 5-lobed to ± halfway; lobes narrow, obtuse, imbricate
• Corolla bilabiate; tube ± campanulate, mouth wide; upper lip entire or 2-lobed, outside in bud; lower lip very broadly 3-lobed, mid-lobe deeply bifid; all lobes spreading
• Stamens 2, posterior, included; filaments short, filiform, arising in upper part of corolla tube; anthers bithecate; thecae equal, parallel, separate, glabrous, held apart by a connective with 2 short arms (slightly stipitate); staminodes 2, anterior, minute or 0
• Ovary bilocular, globose or ovoid; ovules many; style filiform, straight, persistent; stigma slightly 2-lobed, somewhat peltate
• Fruit a spherical, loculicidal capsule; valves 2, entire or bifid
• Seeds small, many, ± ovate, tuberculate
• x = 7

Nomenclature:

• Dopatrium Buch.-Ham. ex Benth.
  • Bentham: 30 (1835)
  • Bentham: 953 (1876)
  • Hemsley & Skan: 324 (1906)
  • Philcox: 51 (1990)
  • Mielcarek: 46 (1996)
  • Fischer: 527 (1997)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 14, tropical, Africa, Asia and Australia
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Dopatrium junceum (Roxb.) Buch.-Ham. ex Benth., Botswana, Northern Province, Mpumalanga (Messina and Nelspruit Districts and Kruger National Park) and Swaziland; seasonal semi-aquatic in or around pools on granite rock or in grassland