Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs or undershrubs, sprawling to erect; stems often quadrangular and branched from base, glabrous or pubescent
• Leaves mostly opposite, sometimes alternate above, linear or lanceolate to ovate, entire or toothed, sessile or petiolate
• Flowers solitary-axillary or in terminal racemes, bracteate, pedicellate, often alternate
• Bracts sometimes leafy
• Calyx 5-lobed, somewhat accrescent in fruit
• Corolla bilabiate, personate, 5-lobed; tube short, extended at front into a dependent spur, pocket or pouch; posterior lip 4-lobed, exterior in bud, with laterals outside both posteriormost lobes and anterior lip; anterior lip 1-lobed, entire or emarginate, with a convex, sometimes papillate palate at its base
• Stamens 4, didynamous, arising in mouth of corolla tube; filaments linear, anterior pair usually bent at base round posterior pair and coming to be in posterior position, usually appendaged at base; anthers usually cohering in pairs about stigma; thecae confluent
• Ovary bilocular, usually elliptical; ovules many; style short, thick and terete or filiform; stigma simple or bilobed
• Fruit a septicidal capsule, usually ovate to urceolate, somewhat laterally compressed; apex rounded to emarginate; valves boat-shaped
• Seeds many in 1 or 2 series, usually ± ellipsoid, more rarely spindle-shaped; wing membranous, entire or interrupted
• x = 9 (10 - 1 report, aneuploids)

Nomenclature:

• Nemesia Vent.
  • Ventenat: 41, t. 41 (I804)
  • Hiern: 169 (1904)
  • Diels: 121 (1910)
  • Merxmüller & Roessler: 34 (1967)
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 385 (1986)
  • Steiner: 405 (1989)
  • Philcox: 9 (1990)
  • Steiner: 63 (1996)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 65, Africa; tropical (few) and southern Africa
• Southern Africa: Species ± 60, in all provinces but mostly in Western Cape