Description:

• Perennial, sinistrorsely twining climbers or much-branched, often rigid to spinescent shrubs up to 1 m high, tomentose to glabrous, greenish, later becoming covered with grey, corky bark; with clear sap; rootstock with fibrous or fusiform roots
• Leaves mostly opposite, erect to pendent, pubescent to glabrous, slightly fleshy to coriaceous; petiole 0.5-3 mm long; blade deltoid to linear, often with auriculate base, generally small
• Inflorescence extra-axillary, finely pubescent, 1-15-flowered
• Sepals divided nearly to base, ± lanceolate, usually pubescent, green to pink-red
• Corolla tube urceolate to tubular or campanulate, 5-angled with prominent ridges descending from bases of lobes, greenish yellow, green, pink or red, inside usually with 5 patches of stiff, downward-pointing golden-yellow hairs; lobes orbicular to deltoid, usually folded inwards along midrib, contorted and twisted, rarely spreading, usually connivent-erect to depressed into mouth of tube and closing it completely
• Corolline corona present in some species, as five rounded lobes projecting from walls of corolla tube and alternating with patches of tawny hairs (hairs all round in sect. Haemax)
• Staminal corona 0
• Gynostegium narrowing from base of gynostegial grooves to acute apex
• Anthers with membranous apical appendage adpressed to style head, tipped with many intertwined hairs
• Pollinia pendulous, mostly flat and long; corpuscle hard, black
• Follicles fusiform, pendulous, tapering to long-acute point, glabrous
• x = 10, 11

Nomenclature:

• Microloma R.Br.
  • Brown: 42 (1810)
  • Brown: 549 (1907)
  • Wanntorp: 1 (1988)
  • Bruyns & Linder: 453 (1991)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 11, Namibia, Namaqualand (Northern Cape), Free State, Western and Eastern Cape