Description:

• Perennial herbs or dwarf shrublets; stems leafy throughout, pubescent, hairs retrorse and minutely glandular
• Leaves opposite below, alternate above, simple, variously elliptical and oblong to oblanceolate, often narrowed to petiole-like, sometimes half-clasping or connate base, usually toothed, thick or leathery, glandular-punctate, sometimes also with glandular and/or eglandular hairs; radical leaves sometimes present
• Flowers in a terminal, cone-shaped, very congested head, nodding in flower, erect and elongated in fruit
• Bracts broad, clearly distinct from leaves, adnate to pedicel, free from calyx
• Calyx unequally 5-lobed, rarely 2 anterior lobes obsolete, split nearly or quite to base at least on anterior side, thin-textured
• Corolla slightly bilabiate, glabrous, thick, leathery when dry; tube funnel-shaped; posterior lobes exterior in bud, lobes spreading, oblong to suborbicular, entire, margins pale, thin-textured
• Stamens 4, didynamous, arising near top of corolla tube, 2 or 4 exserted; posterior filaments decurrent ± to base of tube; anthers synthecate, dorsifixed; staminodes 0
• Nectary at base of ovary on posterior side
• Ovary bilocular, ± oblong; ovules 7-many per locule; stigma lingulate, flattened, with 2 marginal bands of stigmatic papillae, exserted
• Fruit a septicidal capsule with a short loculicidal split at tip of each valve, glabrous
• Seeds angled by pressure, sinuously colliculate, reddish brown
• x = 7

Nomenclature:

• Glumicalyx Hiern
  • Hiern: t. 2769 (1903)
  • Hiern: 369 (1904)
  • Marloth: 129 (1932)
  • Junell: 172 (1961)
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 155 (1977)
  • Hilliard: 526 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 6, mainly Lesotho, also nearby in South Africa, in Free State, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape, along Drakensberg from Harrismith and Golden Gate to Barkly East and Lady Grey