Description:

• Small annual or perennial herbs; stems often prostrate or decumbent, leafy, sometimes with axillary leaf tufts (incipient branches, not brachyblasts); hairs on stems, leaves, bracts and calyx with delicately sculptured walls
• Leaves opposite, bases often connate, sometimes becoming alternate towards stem apex, usually cauline, rarely radical, elliptical, rarely ovate or uppermost spathulate, petiolate, entire or at times few-dentate, pubescent or sometimes ± glabrous
• Flowers shortly pedicellate, usually crowded into racemose, ± globose heads or short spikes, these often arranged in corymbs or panicles
• Bracts adnate to pedicel and up to half of calyx tube
• Calyx usually obliquely and unequally 5-lobed, sometimes 3-lobed but anterior lobes may be retuse or toothed, at least these 2 lobes broadly deltoid, lobes not indurated with age
• Corolla bilabiate, 4- or 5-lobed, membranous, persistent; tube funnel-shaped, glabrous; posterior lip (and sometimes anterior lip as well) bearded with minute 1-celled, clavate hairs, 1- or 2-lobed, often with a yellow/orange patch extending down throat, exterior in bud; anterior lip 3-lobed
• Stamens 4, didynamous; filaments arising ± in middle of corolla tube, decurrent down tube; anthers unilocular, exserted
• Nectary small, adnate on shorter side of ovary base
• Ovary bilocular, elliptic-oblong, base slightly oblique; ovules 1 per locule, pendulous; style filiform; stigma lingulate with 2 marginal bands of stigmatic papillae
• Fruit a pair of soft-walled cocci, outer face convex, smooth or rarely slightly rugose, inner face concave, indehiscent
• Seeds ± elliptical, compressed, convex on one face, ± plane on other, amber-coloured, smooth

Nomenclature:

• Cromidon Compton
  • Compton: 308 (1931)
  • Hilliard: 315 (1990)
  • Hilliard: 1 (1999)
• Selago L., Walafrida E.Mey. & Polycarena Benth. in part
  • Rolfe: 162 (1901)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 12, concentrated in Western and Northern Cape, but 1 extending to Free State, 2 in Namibia