Description:

• Suffrutices or scramblers with perennial or annual stems from a compact woody base
• Rhizome sympodial, often covered by persistent erect cataphylls; roots many, fibrous or often tuberous
• Leaves much reduced, bract-like, with a spinous or soft spur
• Cladodes (phylloclades) solitary or fascicled, persistent or deciduous, green, terete or angled to flat, linear to ovate, apex mucronate, in some species forming a basal disc
• Spines usually present and in some species cauline or foliar in origin
• Flowers bisexual, regular, hypogynous, inconspicuous, solitary, fascicled or racemose; peduncles or pedicels terete or grooved or reduced to a disc or none, articulated once or twice; bracts minute or larger and concave
• Tepals 3 + 3, similar, free and spreading or fused basally
• Stamens 3 + 3; filaments free, arising from base of tepals; anthers bilocular, versatile, introrse, dorsifixed
• Ovary superior, 3-locular with 2-12 axile ovules per locule; style usually short; stigma capitate, 3-lobed or with 3 branches
• Fruit usually a globose or ovoid berry, sometimes a nutlet, tepals often persisting below
• Seeds 1-several, globose, black
• x = 10

Nomenclature:

• Asparagus L.
  • Linnaeus: 313 (1753)
  • Baker: 256 (1896)
  • Jessop: 31 (1966)
  • Merxmüller: 25 (1970)
  • Malcomber & Sebsebe: 63 (1993)
  • Fellingham & Meyer: 205 (1995)
• Myrsiphyllum Willd.
  • Willdenow: 25 (1808)
  • Obermeyer: 86 (1984)
  • Obermeyer & Immelman: 71 (1992).
• Protasparagus Oberm.
  • Obermeyer: 243 (1983)
  • Obermeyer & Immelman: 11 (1992)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 81, widespread in all countries and provinces