Description:

• Erect herbs, sometimes woody at base, covered with straight, white to yellowish spines up to 10 mm long and with dense, short bristles and glandular hairs
• Leaves alternate, ovate or ovate-lanceolate, with margin entire or sinuate-dentate
• Flowers in terminal helicoid cymes or solitary; pedicel short
• Calyx with 10-12 lobes only fused at base; lobes linear, alternate ones nearly as long as corolla, others shorter, sometimes pustulate
• Corolla 10-12-lobed, yellow or white, often with red stripes on outside; tube broadly campanulate or oblong in outline, sometimes gibbous at base, sometimes produced into plates at base inside, with filaments arising on edge of plates; lobes shorter than tube, oblong or ovate-elliptic, sometimes pustulate outside, imbricate
• Stamens 10-12, attached to base of corolla and sometimes slightly exceeding it; filaments semiterete, hirsute below middle, with oblong, versatile anthers
• Ovary narrowed at apex, falsely 2-locular by intrusion of placentas, sometimes pustulate, with many ovules; ovules pyriform; style almost as long as corolla, linear, cleft to almost halfway, with simple stigmas
• Fruit a 2-valved capsule, with valves bearing placentas on their centres
• Seeds many, globose or irregularly angled, rugose
• x = 17

Nomenclature:

• Codon L.
  • Linnaeus: 292 (1767)
  • Wright: 1 (1904)
  • Baker: 1 (1906)
  • Brand: 172 (1913)
  • Phillips: 625 (1951)
  • Friedrich-Holzhammer: 1 (1967)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 2: Codon royenii L. and Codon schenckii Schinz, endemic, Namibia, Northern and Western Cape (north-west region)