Description:

• Erect or ascending perennial herbs, hemiparasitic; stems ± simple or branched, leafy, coarse, hispid-scabrid
• Leaves opposite, sometimes alternate in inflorescence, narrowly-oblong or lanceolate, subentire to dentate, sometimes shortly lobed, sessile or subsessile
• Flowers solitary in axils of upper leaves or bracts, usually in lax terminal racemes, long-pedicellate, bibracteolate, white, pale yellow or brown with dark tube and throat
• Bracts leaf-like, becoming small above; bracteoles in upper half or third of pedicel but well below calyx
• Calyx large, campanulate-oblong, loose, somewhat angled, 5-dentate, 10-ribbed, accrescent, inflated and dry in fruit; lobes erect, subequal, valvate, broadly deltate
• Corolla tubular-campanulate, 5-lobed, much longer than calyx, early deciduous; tube ± funnel-shaped; lobes imbricate, posterior ones interior in bud, widely spreading, rounded, shorter than tube
• Stamens 4, didynamous or ± equal, arising near base of corolla tube, included; filaments linear, pilose; anthers bithecate; thecae ± equal, parallel, apiculate or acuminate
• Nectary annular, fleshy
• Ovary bilocular, ovoid, glabrous; ovules many on thick, fleshy placenta; style terete, curved near apex; stigma clavate or thickened and terete, persistent, exserted from calyx
• Fruit a broadly ellipsoid to subovoid, loculicidal capsule, included in calyx
• Seeds very many, conical, straight or curved, truncate; testa loose, reticulate, transparent, extended each end beyond seed nucleus

Nomenclature:

• Melasma P.J.Bergius
  • Bergius: 162, t. 3, f. 5 (1767)
  • Hiern: 371 (1904) in part (mixed with Alectra)
  • Hemsley & Skan: 361 (1906)
  • Melchior: 119 (1940)
  • Visser: 82, 155, tt. 123-128 (1981)
  • Philcox: 82 (1990)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 5, America, Africa
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Melasma scabrum P.J.Bergius, Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho and Eastern Cape; vleis, marshes and riversides