Description:

• Small solitary or caespitose geophytes, glabrous or sparsely pubescent with uniseriate hairs
• Corm annual, subglobose, covered with reticulate fibrous tunics; roots thin, arising from lower half of corm
• Leaves 1-several, developing after or occasionally during flowering, linear to ovate, often plicate, glabrous or sparsely hairy on ribs or margins; bases surrounded by tubular, sometimes dark, membranous sheaths, often gaping and acute apically
• Inflorescence 1-flowered, 2-6 per corm; scape reduced; bracts 0
• Flowers stellate to hypocrateriform, mostly yellow; pedicels hidden within leaf sheaths or shortly exserted, sometimes sparsely ciliate, triangular in cross section
• Tepals 6, arising from a short or long solid, sometimes ciliate neck, narrowly ovate, patent or reflexed, green-backed, glabrous
• Stamens 6, erect; filaments held close together, short, arising from tepal base; anthers linear, basifixed, sometimes with filiform apical appendages
• Ovary shortly exserted to enclosed by leaf sheaths, 1-locular with 3 parietal placentas; ovules on long, often swollen funicles; style short or long with 3 long, subulate stigmatic lobes
• Fruit indehiscent, fusiform, prolonged into a short or long terete beak, subsucculent to thin-walled when ripe, disintegrating irregularly from apex
• Seeds globose, black, shiny, warty
• x = 7

Nomenclature:

• Empodium Salisb.
  • Salisbury: 43 (1866)
  • Garside: 214 (1950)
  • Bullock: 389 (1962)
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 308 (1973)
• Fabricia Thunb.
  • Thunbreg: 29 (1779)
• Forbesia Eckl. ex Ne
  • Nel: 287 (1914)
  • Phillips: 205 (1951)
• Curculigo Gaertn. sect. Empodium Benth.
  • Bentham: 718 (1883)
  • Baker: 173 (1896)
  • Zimudzi: 311 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species ± 9, endemic, widespread, found in all countries and provinces except Namibia and Botswana