Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs, sometimes shrubs; stems leafy throughout or mostly at base, usually pubescent, often with both glandular and eglandular hairs, the latter often with a much inflated apical cell
• Leaves usually opposite, bases connate, sometimes alternate, all radical or radical and cauline, entire to variously toothed or lobed
• Flowers in a raceme or thyrse, sometimes panicled
• Bracts adnate to base of pedicel, often small, sometimes leaf-like
• Calyx bilabiate; anterior lip 2-lobed, posterior lip 3-lobed; lobes short to long, various in shape, usually pubescent at least on margins
• Corolla bilabiate or nearly regular, 5-lobed; tube usually narrowly cylindrical, abruptly expanding in upper part, rarely funnel-shaped; mouth usually round, sometimes oblique, rarely laterally compressed; limb: posterior lip 2-lobed, exterior in bud, anterior lip 3-lobed; lobes rotate or reflexed, obtuse to subulate, usually entire, sometimes retuse or once or twice bifid, margins often revolute, variously pubescent outside, rarely glabrous, inside usually with 1-5 longitudinal, or 1 transverse, bands of unicellular clavate hairs in throat, these hairs sometimes also around mouth or on upper surface of lobes
• Stamens usually 4, 2, or 2 + 1 or 2 staminodes, didynamous; posterior pair arising in upper half of corolla tube, always included, with filaments not decurrent down tube, often bearded with unicellular clavate hairs, anthers vertical, often cohering; anterior pair arising just below mouth, exceeding posterior pair, anthers usually smaller, ± oblique, included or just visible in mouth; anthers synthecate, dorsifixed
• Nectary basal on shorter side of ovary
• Ovary bilocular, elliptical or cuneate, base slightly oblique, glabrous (except for glistening glands sometimes on sutures); ovules many per locule; stigma lingulate with 2 marginal bands of stigmatic papillae, exserted or included
• Fruit a septicidal capsule, usually glabrous, rarely minutely glandular-puberulous; valves with a short loculicidal split at tip
• Seeds ± pyriform to elliptical; testa thin, white to violet-blue, tightly investing bothrospermous endosperm, having several longitudinal rows of transversely elongated pits in chequer-board pattern
• x = 8 (9 - 1 report)

Nomenclature:

• Manulea L.
  • Linnaeus: 12 (1767) name conserved
  • Bentham: 381 (1836)
  • Bentham: 363 (1876)
  • Hiern: 221 (1904)
  • Merxmüller & Roessler: 29 (1967)
  • Greuter et al.: 298 (1994)
  • Hilliard: 291 (1994)
• Nemia P.J.Bergius
  • Bergius: 160 (1767) name rejected
• Lychnidia Moench
  • Moench: 160 (1802)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 74, Africa, 1 in India, rest in southern Africa extending into Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola
• Southern Africa: Species 73, in all areas but most in Western Cape, gradually fewer species north- and eastwards