Description:

• Deciduous perennials
• Rootstock a persistent, apically rooting corm, new corms produced from base of flowering stem, older corms not resorbed, accumulating below current corm; tunics membranous, evanescent, usually lacking in preserved material
• Stem erect, short or long, usually covered by overlapping leaf sheaths, or partly exposed, sticky below nodes in 1 species, usually branched, branches usually crowded in upper half
• Leaves unifacial, sword-shaped to linear or falcate, thick and somewhat succulent, usually glaucous, usually without a central vein
• Inflorescences rhipidia, terminal on long branches or crowded near apex on short branches; spathes resembling leaves in texture and colour, inner exceeding outer
• Flowers fugaceous or lasting up to 3 days, pedicellate, included in spathes, 2-6 per rhipidium, often dull shades of brown to yellow, occasionally blue, usually mottled with darker colour, tepal limb margins lighter or darker, often unpleasantly scented, or sweetly scented of vanilla, with perigonal nectaries at tepal bases
• Tepals free, subequal or outer slightly larger than inner, clawed, claws forming a wide cup, limbs spreading horizontally or somewhat below horizontal, margins crisped
• Stamens: filaments united below in a column around style, free above and spreading; anthers appressed to style branches, thecae oval, parallel or divergent; pollen monosulcate, exine reticulate
• Ovary ovoid-truncate to narrowly oblong, tapering above, sometimes extending upward in a sterile tubular beak
• Style filiform, dividing above filament column, branches short, deeply divided into 2 flattened lobes, these each with an abaxial stigma lobe and divided terminally into fringed crests
• Capsules oblong to ellipsoid, with short to long acute apices
• Seeds globose or angled by pressure, more or less rugose, surface smooth
• x = 10 (polyploidy)

Classification Notes:

• Ferraria is a taxonomically isolated genus characterised by corms that lack a visible tunic and by dull flowers with fringed style crests

Nomenclature:

• Ferraria Burm. ex Mill.
  • Miller: 187 (1759)
  • De Vos: 327 (1979)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 11, south tropical Africa to the S Cape, South Africa
• Southern Africa: Centred along the west coast of South Africa (Northern and Western Cape), mostly in sandy soils

Additional Notes:

• Although pollination has not been critically studied, species are known to be pollinated by a variety of carrion flies, including Calliphoridae and Muscidae, attracted by the foetid or spicy scent and dull colouration
• F. farrariola seems an exception in the genus in having the flowers pollinated by honey bees