Description:

• Shrubs or shrublets, erect, and usually single-stemmed at base
• Leaves alternate or opposite, linear, linear-lanceolate, to orbicular, flat, round-backed, subcomplicate, or subulate; erect or spreading
• Flowers terminal, solitary or 2-nate or aggregated into heads of up to 60 florets, flowering at different times and mostly without any conspicuous involucral leaves; flowers subtended by 1, or rarely 2, bracts and 2 bracteoles
• Petals 5, distinctly divided into claw and limb; claw transversely bearded above, ciliate on margins and narrowing below, forming a cage around reproductive parts of flower; limb white or pale pink, usually spreading
• Stamens 5; filaments usually ± 1 mm long, glabrous, acicular; anthers dorsifixed, apical gland globose, minute; staminodes 5, rarely 0, usually a minute vestigial sessile gland
• Disc enveloping, obvallate or spreading, exceeding ovary
• Ovary 5-carpellate; apices globose; stigma capitellate or capitate-globose; style becoming 0.5-1.6 mm long, glabrous, erect, or, at some stage, deflexed
• Fruit (3)5-carpellate; horns (0.5-)1-2(-7) mm long
• x = 7 or 14 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Euchaetis Bartl. & H.L.Wendl.
  • Bartling & Wendland: 15 (1824)
  • Williams: 157 (1981)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 23, concentrated in the Western Cape