Description:

• Shrubs, spreading to erect, rarely small trees; often with coppice shoots sprouting from underground lignotubers after fires
• Leaves usually small, spirally imbricate, linear to very broadly ovate, often keeled, sometimes petiolate, usually minutely stipulate, leaves in bud always uniquely with a fleshy terminal colleter, later shrinking to a dark apiculus or lost
• Flowers bisexual, usually regular, small, from occasionally solitary and sometimes in stipitate spikelets, to spikes, panicles or dense capitula with a ± clavate receptacle; bracts 1-several per flower, if 1, then usually 2 bracteoles; floral receptacle bearing flower parts often ribbed, sometimes warty or wrinkled
• Calyx: sepals 5, free or connate at base or vestigial, segments imbricate to well separated
• Corolla: petals 5, rarely lightly adnate to connate with filaments to form a weak tube from below to up to most of filament length; often crested next to ovary; white to cream, sometimes mauve, purple or scarlet
• Stamens 5, free, or adnate to connate as noted above; filaments linear; anthers 2-thecous with thecae sometimes partly free and ± divergent, opening by longitudinal slits
• Nectary uncommon, a fleshy ring on top of ovary
• Ovary usually half to fully inferior, rarely superior, sometimes with floral receptacle extended above to form a cup-shaped hypanthium; with 1-3(4 or 5) locules usually lateral to the flower stem plane, rarely oblique to dorsiventral; septa (wall(s) between locules) often incomplete; ovules 1-16 per locule, pendulous, sometimes sterile as dark flakes in spongy tissue filling the locule; placentas distal to rarely parietal or free-central from below; styles free to adnate or connate and distally divergent; stigmas minute
• Fruit indehiscent to dehiscent with 2-4 valves
• Seeds fleshy, testa thin

Classification Notes:

• The subdivision into tribes proposed by Marloth (1925) and Niedenzu & Harms (1930) is not meaningful. Based on morphology, anatomy and chemotaxonomic data (G. Scott, pers. comm.) the genera are sequenced below by decreasing average apomorphy, constrained by the clustering:
  
  Thamnea, Audouinia, Berzelia, Brunia, Linconia, Pseudobaeckea, Staavia, Lonchostoma, Raspalia

Nomenclature:

• Bruniaceae
  • Sonder: 309 (1862)
  • Marloth: 35 (1925)
  • Niedenzu & Harms: 288 (1930)
  • Pillans: 121 (1947)
  • Dahlgren: 21 (1988)
  • Goldblatt & Manning: 383 (2000)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Genera 9, species 57, endemic, Western Cape to KwaZulu-Natal, concentrated in the SW Western Cape

References:

• DAHLGREN, R. 1988. Bruniaceae DC. In R. Dahlgren & A.E. van Wyk, Structures and relationships of families endemic to or centered in southern Africa. Monographs in Systematic Botany from the Missouri Botanical Garden 25
• GOLDBLATT, P. & MANNING, J. 2000. Cape plants. A conspectus of the Cape flora of South Africa. Strelitzia 9
• MARLOTH, R. 1925. Bruniaceae. The flora of South Africa 2
• NIEDENZU, F. & HARMS, H. 1930. Bruniaceae. Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien 2, 18a
• PILLANS, N.S. 1947. A revision of Bruniaceae. Journal of South African Botany 13
• SONDER, O.W. 1862. Bruniaceae. Flora capensis 2

Resources:

• Key to Bruniaceae genera

• Bruniaceae genera: