Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs, often with unpleasant smell, hairy or glabrous
• Leaves alternate, incise-dentate, pinnatifid or pinnatisect
• Capitula radiate, medium to large, usually solitary and pedunculate, terminal, rarely laxly corymbose
• Involucre hemispherical, bracts in several rows, outer shorter than inner, margins scarious
• Receptacle flat to convex, finally conical or oblong, paleate, paleae scarious and oblong or subulate, truncate to acute to acuminate
• Ray florets female, fertile or neuter; corolla white or rarely yellow, strap-shaped
• Disc florets bisexual, yellow; tube ± compressed, sometimes 2-winged, sometimes investing top of ovary, usually dilated above, 5-toothed
• Anthers ecalcarate and ecaudate, with ovate apical appendage
• Style branches linear, truncate, penicillate
• Cypselas oblong, turbinate, 4- or 5-angled, 8-10-ribbed or multistriate
• Pappus 0, or sometimes of minute scales or minutely coroniform
• x = 9 (7, 8) (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Anthemis L.
  • Linnaeus: 893 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 381 (1754)
  • Henderson & Anderson: 318 (1966)
  • Hilliard: 343 (1977)
  • Bremer & Humphries: 132 (1993)
  • Bremer: 464 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 211, Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, Australia and New Zealand
• Southern Africa: Species 2, naturalised: *Anthemis arvensis L., only in KwaZulu-Natal, and *A. cotula L., in North-West, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape