Description:

• Perennial shrublets or herbs, flowering sometimes as seedlings; stems brittle, leafy, very glandular-pubescent, sometimes woody
• Leaves mostly alternate, opposite only at extreme base of seedlings, petiolate, broadly ovate, serrate
• Flowers pedicellate, sometimes bracteate and 1- or 2-bracteolate, in axils of upper leaves, solitary, paired or in cymules with up to 11 flowers, forming leafy racemes or narrow panicles
• Bracts, if present, very small, free from pedicels
• Calyx 5-lobed nearly to base, hardly bilabiate; lobes elliptic-spathulate
• Corolla slightly irregular, 5-lobed; tube cylindrical, scarcely expanded at apex, glabrous outside, throat bearded inside with broad band of clavate hairs; upper lip 2-lobed with lobes joined for ± half their length, exterior in bud; lower lip 3-lobed
• Stamens 4, didynamous; posterior pair arising ± halfway up tube, included, with filaments decurrent to tube base, forming channel for style; anterior pair arising in throat, very shortly exserted; all filaments bearded with long clavate hairs or not, minutely glandular at apex; anthers synthecate, dorsifixed, anterior ones often slightly larger than posterior; staminodes 0
• Nectary ill-defined at base of ovary, but probably annular, either convoluted or swollen on one side
• Ovary bilocular, cuneate, tapering into style, glabrous; ovules many per locule; stigma very short, held in throat or very shortly exserted; stigmatic papillae in a lateral groove carried over apex, tip sometimes very shortly bifid
• Fruit a sharply beaked, septicidal capsule, tip of each valve with a short loculicidal split
• Seeds very small, red-brown, oblong, with 6-8 longitudinal ribs (aulacospermous); testa reticulate in furrows between ribs

Nomenclature:

• Camptoloma Benth.
  • Bentham: 430 (1846)
  • Bentham: 960 (1876)
  • Hilliard: 80 (1994)
• Urbania Vatke
  • Vatke: 10 (1875)
• Sutera Roth in part, Merxmüller & Roessler
  • Merxmüller & Roessler: 50 (1967)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 3, Canary Islands, South Yemen, Socotra, Kuria Muria Islands (Oman), Somalia and western deserts of Angola
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Camptoloma rotundifolium Benth., Namibia, in northern half, as far south as Naukluft Mountains