Description:

• Perennial, tufted, sometimes decumbent or stoloniferous
• Leaf blade linear, usually expanded; ligule an unfringed to a fringed membrane, often bearded at collar
• Inflorescence of racemes, digitate, or subdigitate, or a panicle with a long central axis, or a spatheate, leafy false panicle (this may not be easily discernible), pedicels and internodes linear, longitudinally grooved with a translucent median line; spikelets usually paired, secund, in long-short combinations: one sessile, the other pedicelled, pedicels free from rachis
• Sessile spikelet 3-4 mm long, dorsiventrally compressed, falling with glumes; glumes ± equal, dissimilar, firm to membranous; lower glume flattened on back, 2-keeled, sometimes with 1-3 pits in middle, hairy or glabrous, acute to subacute; upper glume distinctly keeled
• Florets 2; lower floret sterile, reduced to hyaline lemma, awnless; upper floret bisexual, lemma less firm in texture than glumes, reduced to a hyaline stipe, glabrous, entire, awned, awn glabrous, geniculate, longer than body of lemma; callus short, rounded, hairy; palea reduced or 0
• Lodicules 2
• Stamens 3
• Ovary ellipsoid, glabrous; styles plumose above
• Caryopsis oblong, slightly dorsiventrally compressed

• Pedicelled spikelet symmetrical, same size or smaller than sessile spikelet, glabrous, sterile or male, awnless.
• x = 10 (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Bothriochloa Kuntze
  • Kuntze: 762 (1891)
  • Stapf: 344 (1898)
  • Chippindall: 482 (1955)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 719 (1982)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 344 (1986)
  • Gibbs Russell et al.: 62 (1990)
  • Watson & Dallwitz: 175 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 35, throughout the tropics
• Southern Africa: Species 3, widespread but not in the Western Cape