Description:

• Perennial herbs, with a tuber, or clusters of fusiform, or occasionally fibrous roots
• Stems prostrate to erect, often twining, sometimes succulent
• Leaves sessile or petiolate, sometimes fleshy, occasionally rudimentary on fleshy stems
• Flowers in umbel-like clusters, racemes, or 1-several developing together or in succession, mainly lateral on nodes
• Corolla with tube usually longer than lobes, often ± inflated near base, narrowed above, then expanding to mouth, often with long hairs within; lobes recurved, pendulous, connate at tips into a cage-like structure, forming umbrella-like canopy, or a capitate and winged apical body; free margins often replicate, often ciliate
• Corona 2-seriate; outer corona cupular, campanulate, 5-notched, 5- or 10-toothed, of 5 bifid lobes, or reduced to pockets between bases of inner lobes and confluent with them; inner corona lobes linear, linear-lanceolate, spatulate or filiform, sometimes with dilated tips, usually longer than staminal column and incumbent upon it
• Anthers 2-locular, without appendages
• Pollinia ascending or subhorizontal; caudicles short; corpuscle usually winged
• Follicles narrowly fusiform, acute or obtuse, smooth or rugose
• Seeds obovate, narrowly winged, crowned with a tuft of hairs
• x = 11 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Ceropegia L.
  • Linnaeus: 211 (1753)
  • Brown: 804 (1908)
  • Huber: 5 (1957)
  • Huber: 114 (1967)
  • Bruyns: 21 (1980)
  • Dyer: 43 (1980)
  • Dyer: 133 (1983)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species over 160, Africa and Madagascar to Australia
• Southern Africa: Species more than 50, widespread, but rarely common; rare in Western Cape