Description:

• Erect or spreading shrubs to small trees, some sprouting from an underground lignotuber
• Leaves lanceolate to oblanceolate or ovate; sessile, hard-textured and inflexible at base; stipules mostly absent; bud leaf colleter a papilla, darkening and shrinking to a narrow deltoid lamina or minute cone, later persistent or lost
• Flowers borne in very dense spherical capitula with a clavate to globose receptacle; flowers in each capitulum 30-400; bracts closely appressed, spathulate to narrowly lanceolate or deltoid; bracteoles two, connate with the very short pedicel; floral receptacle with or without ribs
• Calyx: sepals free, regular to sometimes irregular, linear to oblanceolate, with a dark apiculus
• Corolla white to cream, usually regular, occasionally irregular near base of capitulum; petals very narrowly obovate to oblanceolate, lightly adnate to filaments forming a weak tube; each petal with two adaxial crests in tube, or if one, then diverging into 2 lobes
• Stamens erect or some recurved by ± 90° near apex; anther thecae united or partly free and slightly divergent; pollen grains with 4-8 colpi
• Nectary 0; scent seldom recorded, where known sweetish or cabbage-like
• Ovary half- to fully inferior; locules 2, 1-3 ovules in each, sometimes with one locule barren; ovules often sterile as dark flakes in spongy tissue filling locule; styles slightly to nearly fully adnate, sometimes divergent
• Fruit with persistent flower parts, indehiscent or a 4-valved capsule
• Seeds ellipsoid to oblong
• x = 10

Nomenclature:

• Brunia Lam.
  • Lamarck: 474 (1785)
  • Sonder: 313 (1862) in part
  • Pillans: 178 (1947)
• Nebelia Neck. ex Sweet
  • Sweet: 116 (1830)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 7, mountains, mainly in the SW Western Cape, extending to the Cockscomb (SW Eastern Cape)