Description:

• Shrubs or small trees, erect, decumbent, or sprawling
• Leaves alternate, loosely ascending or imbricate, sessile or petiolate, linear to oval, oblanceolate, obovate or spatulate, entire or with up to 17 teeth at apex, glabrous or pubescent with a short indumentum of fine, crisped hairs
• Inflorescence a capitulum, axillary, solitary or in groups of up to 10 per flowering shoot, sessile or pedunculate; involucral bracts small, green, cartilaginous or papyraceous
• Receptacle cylindric, conic, globose or flat
• Flowers bisexual, regular or irregular
• Perianth cylindric in bud, straight or adaxially curved, pubescent, fused at base into short tube; tube cylindric or narrow proximally and inflated distally; three adaxial claws fused to form a sheath; abaxial claw separating from others; limbs lanceolate to ovate, acute
• Anthers sessile or subsessile, arising from base of perianth limbs, ovoid-ellipsoid
• Ovary slender, puberulous, with 1 ovule; style straight or adaxially arcuate, tapering; pollen presenter cylindric, clavate, ovoid, conic, or obliquely turbinate
• Hypogynous scales 4, linear to deltoid-subulate
• Fruit an ovoid to cylindric achene, introrse at base, glabrous or minutely puberulous
• x = 12

Nomenclature:

• Leucospermum R.Br.
  • Brown: 95 (1810)
  • Stapf et al.: 610 (1912)
  • Rourke: 1 (1972)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 48, mainly southwestern and southern region of Western Cape, extending to Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Zimbabwe