Description:

• Perennial herbs, rosulate at base with erect flowering stems; usually with strong rootstock
• Leaves simple, rarely multisect, usually coarsely ciliate or setose on margin; radical ones petiolate; cauline ones sessile
• Flowers in few-flowered heads usually arranged in panicles; involucral bracts usually coloured and in two rows
• Calyx with variable lobes
• Petals erect with long, inflexed apices, keeled on face
• Disc usually tumid
• Fruit globose, ovoid or obovoid, scarcely laterally compressed; carpophore reduced, undivided; mericarps convex on back, usually prominently 3-keeled, with keels obtuse, flat on face, with 5 oil ducts, sometimes pustulate
• Seeds often planoconvex and ribbed on convex side, sometimes without ribs

Nomenclature:

• Alepidea F.Delaroche
  • Delaroche: 19 (1808)
  • Sonder: 533 (1862)
  • Dümmer: 7 (1913)
  • Wolff: 94 (1913)
  • Weimarck: 217 (1949)
  • Cannon & Constance: 567 (1978)
  • Burtt: 293 (1982)
  • Townsend: 19 (1989)
  • Burtt: 163, 253 (1991)
  • De Castro & Van Wyk: 345 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 28, mainly southern Africa, a few extending northwards to Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ethiopia
• Southern Africa: From the Eastern Cape to the summer-rainfall region