Description:

• Halophytic, low, spreading, woody shrublets, rarely annuals, often hairy and salt-encrusted
• Leaves opposite, decussate below, in verticils of 4 above, with leaf clusters (from suppressed branchlets) bearing flowers in their axils, sessile, subsessile or shortly petiolate, connected by an amplexicaul, usually ciliate, stipular ridge or sheath; lamina small, linear to ovate, flat or with margins rolled back, often tightly so and thus terete or sausage-shaped, glabrous or pubescent, punctate
• Flowers regular, usually bisexual, in forks of branches (determinate), sessile, small, persistent, scattered all over or aggregate in terminal dichasia (leaves subtending flowers in dichasia not differing from ordinary leaves)
• Calyx tubular, induplicate, 4- or 5-fid with prominent ribs, glabrous, puberulous and occasionally with long scattered setae
• Petals 5, free, imbricate, with an adnate scale or ligule attached to inside of claw, pink, mauvy pink or white
• Stamens 6 (rarely 4 or 5); filaments connivent and expanded below, filiform above; anthers 2-locular, 2-partite or nearly so, versatile
• Ovary superior, 1-locular, with parietal placentas bearing 1-many ovules; style terete, with 3 stigmatic lobes
• Capsule enclosed in calyx, dehiscing longitudinally, ovoid to narrowly ovoid
• Seeds small, ellipsoid-fusiform, papillate or smooth, albuminous, maturing very early
• x = 5 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Frankenia L.
  • Linnaeus: 331 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 154 (1754)
  • Harvey: 114 (1860)
  • Roessler & Schreiber: 1 (1968)
  • Obermeyer: 33 (1976)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 80, Mediterranean, along the Atlantic seaboard, western and southern parts of Africa and Australia (± 45 species) to Asia and the Americas
• Southern Africa: Species 3, two endemic, the third almost cosmopolitan and weed-like in behaviour. Halophytes, usually gregarious, found along the coast and further inland, rarely in nonsaline habitats