Description:

• Annual herbs, small, prostrate and woolly
• Leaves alternate, sessile, small, oblong to spathulate, obtuse, base narrowed, margins flat, entire, loosely enveloped in wool (hair type B), eglandular
• Capitula disciform, campanulate, closely surrounded by leaves, massed in glomerules at branchlet tips; flowers whitish, often tipped reddish
• Involucral bracts in 2 or 3 rows; apex obtuse to truncate, often emarginate, whitish to straw-coloured; stereome divided
• Receptacle shortly honeycombed or shallowly tuberculate, epaleate
• Marginal florets female, narrowly tubular or filiform, fewer than, more than or equalling disc florets
• Disc florets bisexual; corolla tubular below, campanulate above, with 5 deltoid lobes; all lobes glandular-hairy on backs
• Anthers caudate, ecalcarate, with small, obtuse apical appendage; endothecial tissue polarised
• Style bifid; style branches truncate and penicillate, obtuse sweeping hairs scarcely extending down backs of branches
• Cypselas oblong, usually with minute globular duplex hairs, or ellipsoidal unicellular; all myxogenic
• Pappus bristles in 1 row, either wholly plumose or with clavate cells at tip and shaft wholly or partly plumose, subplumose, barbellate or nude, when not plumose, base with patent cilia, or bristles expanded in lowest quarter and fused at base
• x = 7

Nomenclature:

• Lasiopogon Cass.
  • Cassini: 75 (1818)
  • Harvey: 264 (1865)
  • Nordenstam: 60 (1964)
  • Hilliard: 5 (1983)
  • Anderberg: 155 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 359 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 8, mainly Africa, 1 also Spain to India
• Southern Africa: Species 8, Namibia, Free State, Northern, Western and Eastern Cape