Description:

• Low shrubs, sprawling to erect, often with coppice shoots sprouting from lignotubers after fires
• Leaves ovate to narrowly lanceolate, longer in coppice shoots, sessile; leaf margins ciliate to lanate; minute stipules seldom visible; bud leaf colleter soon shrivelling to a black cone or lost
• Flowers each in a spikelet, solitary and terminal in an involucre of 5-12 bracts at end of a short stipe, spikelets on an elongate peduncle, old stipes persistent; ciliate bracts with a prominent midrib and often several parallel veins, bases of two lowest bracts forming an inverted shallow bowl around narrowed tip of stipe; floral receptacle often with fleshy warts or transverse wrinkles and a rib below each sepal
• Calyx: sepals free, narrowly ovate to triangular, whitish to bright red; sepal midrib prominent, often with parallel lateral veins
• Corolla white to bright red; petals free, clawed, glabrous, often with small crests next to ovary
• Stamens free; anther thecae either united or partly free; pollen grains tricolporate
• Nectary and scent either 0 or not recorded
• Ovary inferior to half-inferior; locules 2 (also 3 and very rarely 4 or 5), wall between locules sometimes incomplete; ovules 1 or 2 per locule, or 0, pendulous, or ovules sterile as dark flakes in spongy tissue filling locule; styles terete or distally furrowed, rarely partly to fully free, erect or apically diverging
• Fruit little known, at least sometimes indehiscent
• Seed apparently germinating through fruit wall
• x = 11

Nomenclature:

• Audouinia Brongn.
  • Brongniart: 384 (1826)
  • Sonder: 323 (1862)
  • Pillans: 127 (1947)
• Tittmannia Brongn.
  • Brongniart: 385 (1826) name conserved, not of Rchb.
  • Sonder: 312 (1862)
  • Niedenzu & Harms: 298 (1930)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 5, Western Cape, concentrated in the southwest