Description:

• Perennial or (rarely) annual succulent herbs; perennials commonly with storage organs such as bulbs, corms, rhizomes or tubers, often with separate fertile and sterile shoots; roots many, thin or stout, sometimes tuberous
• Leaves succulent, spirally arranged or distichous, sessile
• Inflorescences terminal, or terminal and axillary, or all axillary cymes, each cyme subtended by a spathaceous, leaf-like bract and usually with large, herbaceous, persistent bracteoles; flowers 2-ranked, sessile or subsessile
• Flowers bisexual, regular, small, open for a few hours only, in the morning
• Sepals tubular below, usually with hairy lobes, persistent
• Petals united into short tube, 3 lobes erect or spreading, acute to obtuse, blue, purple or pink
• Stamens 6, equal, erect, white or coloured like corolla or darker; filaments filiform, or sometimes fusiform in upper half, long, patent, beaded hairs always present in upper half; anthers yellow, basifixed, locules opening from a basal aperture, then splitting open to apex
• Ovary ovoid, 3-locular, hairy above; ovules 2 in each locule, superposed; style thin, filiform or in some species fusiform below small apical stigma, glabrous or bearded
• Fruit a capsule, narrowly ovoid, erect
• Seeds oblong-globose, obtuse; testa greyish brown, wrinkled or pitted, epidermis minutely pellucid-dotted; embryotega at apex of upper seed, and at base of lower seed
• x = 12 (10, 11, 13, 17)

Nomenclature:

• Cyanotis D.Don
  • Don: 45 (1825)
  • Clarke: 13 (1897)
  • Clarke: 78 (1901)
  • Schreiber: 9 (1967)
  • Obermeyer & Faden: 50 (1985)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 50, warm regions of Africa, Asia and N Australia
• Southern Africa: Species 7, N Namibia and Botswana, northern provinces of South Africa, Free State, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape, absent in Northern and Western Cape except in the far east