Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs, sometimes rather woody at base, occasionally scandent
• Leaves alternate, simple, entire or lobed
• Inflorescences dense, terminal and axillary spikes, or in fascicles along floriferous branchlets, or more generally lax or compact terminal and axillary thyrses, bracteate
• Flowers bisexual, small, white, silvery or rosy, sessile or shortly pedicellate; bracteoles 2
• Tepals 5, free, all ± equal, glabrous or rarely somewhat pilose
• Stamens 5; filaments expanded and fused into a cup below, free portions deltoid below and narrow above or ± swollen below; pseudostaminodes 0, rarely with minute, blunt intermediate teeth; anthers 2-thecous
• Ovary ovoid to subglobose; ovules few to many, rarely solitary; style distinct and elongate to almost obsolete; stigmas 2 or 3, circular to filiform
• Capsule membranous, circumscissile, sometimes thickened at apex
• Seeds black, usually strongly compressed and shining, subcircular, reticulate, grooved, punctate or tuberculate, not arillate; endosperm present
• x = 9 (7, 11) (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Celosia L.
  • Linnaeus: 205 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 96 (1754)
  • Hooker: 24 (1880)
  • Schinz: 99 (1893)
  • Schinz: 178 (1895)
  • Schinz: 4 (1903)
  • Baker & Clarke: 16 (1909)
  • Cooke & Wright: 404 (1910)
  • Schinz: 7 (1934)
  • Meeuse: 145 (1961)
  • Townsend: 1 (1975)
  • Townsend: 30 (1988)
  • Townsend: 141 (1993a)
  • Townsend: 80 (1993b)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 45, warmer regions of both Old and New World
• Southern Africa: Species 2, mainly in Namibia, Botswana, Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape