Description:

• Terrestrial herbs, with globose or palmate root tubers
• Leaves radical and adpressed to ground or cauline
• Inflorescence lax or dense, racemose; flowers normally resupinate, white and/or green, rarely yellow, orange or pink; bracts mainly narrow
• Sepals unequal, free; laterals spreading; median one often forming hood with petals or with upper petal lobe
• Petals simple or deeply bilobed, usually narrower than median sepal, lower lobe sometimes descending and simulating lip lobe
• Lip often shortly adnate to gynostemium, spurred, entire or variously lobed
• Gynostemium: anther thecae parallel or diverging, adjacent or separated by wide connective, anther canals short or much elongated and adnate to lateral rostellum arms; pollinia 2, sectile, with caudicles attached to small viscidia; stigma extended into 2 short or elongate, often clavate processes; rostellum 3-lobed, lateral lobes divergent and short or long, central lobe various
• Capsule oblong or ellipsoid, sometimes beaked
• x = 21 (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Habenaria Willd.
  • Willdenow: 44 (1805)
  • Rolfe: 117 (1912)
  • Phillips: 231 (1951)
  • Schelpe: 72 (1966)
  • Stewart et al.: 82 (1982)
  • Linder & Kurzweil: 110 (1999)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 800, throughout tropics and subtropics of the world
• Southern Africa: Species 35, widespread in northern and eastern parts