Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs or shrubs, rarely scandent or climbing, glabrous or with simple hairs
• Leaves narrow or broad, simple, entire or variously dentate or lobed or pinnately or sub-bipinnately partite; stipules 0 or 2, minute
• Inflorescence usually racemose, sometimes flowers axillary or few together on short side branches, or intercalary; pedicels sometimes subtended by 2 minute bracts
• Sepals caducous or subpersistent, outer 2 often cucullate, sometimes horned or thickened at apex, inner 2 saccate at base or not
• Petals lanceolate to subcircular, generally clawed, with (0)1(2) appendages at base, or papillate, white, blue, lilac, mauve, purple or pink
• Stamens 6; none, all, or only 2 short filaments with appendages or papillate at base
• Nectaries 2, semicircular, horseshoe-shaped or biprismatic, outside lateral (short) filaments
• Fruit a siliqua, dehiscent, short or long, linear to obovate-circular, with straight margins or deeply constricted between seeds, terete or dorsally compressed, latiseptate, sessile or stipitate; valves flat or bulged by seeds, 1-7-nerved, glabrous or hairy, smooth, papillate or somewhat warted; style short or long, slender or stout, much swollen in fruit
• Seeds generally in 1 row, few to many, flattened, ovoid or globose, immarginate or winged, smooth or papillose; cotyledons twice transversely folded
• x = 10

Nomenclature:

• Heliophila L.
  • Linnaeus: 926 (1763)
  • Sonder: 35 (1860)
  • Schulz: 536 (1931)
  • Schreiber 48: 4 (1966)
  • Marais: 17 (1970)
• Carponema (DC.) Eckl. & Zeyh.
  • Ecklon & Zeyher: 8 (1834-1835)
  • Sonder: 35 (1860)
  • Adamson: 418 (1950)
  • Phillips: 347 (1951)
  • Marais: 17 (1970)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 75, endemic, mostly from winter-rainfall areas of Northern, Western and Eastern Cape, but a few widely distributed