Description:

• Erect, annual or short-lived perennial herbs, with long stinging hairs on all aerial parts; plants monoecious or dioecious by abortion
• Leaves alternate, elliptic to ovate, mostly variously divided, coarsely serrate or lobed, always 3-nerved, petiolate, with dot-like cystoliths; stipules intrapetiolar, connate, often large
• Inflorescences simple or paniculate spikes, axillary and solitary or paired, male often long, slender with flowers clustered on rachis; female sessile, very densely branched, armed with stinging hairs
• Male flowers pedicellate; tepals 4 or 5, ovate, concave, valvate in bud; bud depressed; stamens as many as tepals; ovary rudimentary
• Female flowers sessile, with 3 almost completely connate tepals ± enclosing ovary, split to base on one side, sometimes with 1 minute free tepal; staminodes 0; ovary ± asymmetrical, reflexed, laterally compressed; ovule erect from base; stigma subulate to filiform, acute, very minutely papillose
• Achene broad, oblique, much compressed, rugose, with remains of persistent perianth at base
• x = 10, 12 (B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• Girardinia Gaudich.
  • Gaudichaud-Beaupré: 498 (1830)
  • Endlicher: 283 (1837)
  • Weddell: 163, t. 2B (1856)
  • Weddell: 100 (1869)
  • Bentham: 384 (1880)
  • Engler: 107 (1888)
  • Rendle: 265 (1917)
  • Friis: 143 (1981)
  • Friis: 12 (1989)
  • Friis: 85 (1991)
  • Friis: 621 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 2, mountains of Old World tropics, from West Africa, Madagascar, Asia to SE China
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Girardinia diversifolia (Link) Friis, Northern Province and Mpumalanga