Description:

• Perennial herbs
• Leaves alternate, sessile, lanceolate-ovate-elliptic, flat, herbaceous, pubescent-glabrescent, with serrate margins
• Capitula radiate, terminal, solitary or laxly corymbose on ± distinctly pedunculoid branch ends
• Involucre broadly campanulate; involucral bracts imbricate, lanceolate-oblong-narrowly obovate, herbaceous, acute, with membranous margins and tips
• Receptacle somewhat convex, epaleate
• Ray florets many, female, fertile, white, without distinct tube; lamina apically bifid or subentire, with densely colliculate upper surface and glandular smooth lower surface, confluent with cypsela
• Disc florets many, bisexual, yellow; corolla tubular ± regular, 5-lobed, glandular, confluent with cypsela
• Anthers ecalcarate and ecaudate, with broadly ovate-oblong obtuse-rounded appendage; endothecial cells with many thickenings on vertical walls; filament collar oblong, of subequal cells
• Style fertile with truncate branches; style base swollen, placed on top of and partly immersed in short and broad nectary
• Cypselas oblong, somewhat compressed with 10 ribs, 10 veins and 10 associated resin ducts, glandular
• Pappus 0

Nomenclature:

• Adenanthellum B.Nord.
  • Nordenstam: 160 (1979)
  • Bremer & Humphries: 145 (1993)
  • Bremer: 470 (1994)
• Adenanthemum B.Nord. not of Conw.
  • Conwentz: 91 (1886)
  • Nordenstam: 157 (1976)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Monotypic: Adenanthellum osmitoides (Harv.) B.Nord.; endemic to Mpumalanga, Swaziland and N KwaZulu-Natal