Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs, usually hairy
• Leaves alternate, mostly oblong or lanceolate, entire; basal ones shortly petiolate, cauline ones sessile
• Flowers in simple or dichotomously branched, terminal and axillary scorpioid cymes, cymes lengthening considerably in fruit; bisexual
• Calyx with a very shallowly campanulate tube; 5-lobed to below middle, lobes linear-lanceolate to oblong; not or slightly enlarging in fruit
• Corolla white or blue; tube cylindric or campanulate, usually with appendages in throat opposite lobes; 5-lobed to ± halfway
• Stamens arising in corolla tube, included or exserted; filaments filiform; anthers linear, with connective prolonged into a small trulliform appendage
• Ovary on disc; deeply 4-lobed with a solitary ovule in each locule; gynobase disc-like; style gynobasic, filiform; stigma obtuse
• Fruit of 4 nutlets; nutlets erect, oblong-ovoid, glabrous, shiny, fixed by a small basal areole to gynobase
• x = 12, 11 (8) (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Myosotis L.
  • Linnaeus: 131 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 63 (1754)
  • Candolle: 104 (1846)
  • Bentham: 858 (1876)
  • Boissier: 234 (1879)
  • Gürke: 118 (1897)
  • Wright: 18 (1904)
  • Stroh: 317 (1942)
  • Riedl: 255 (1967)
  • Grau & Merxmüller: 111 (1972)
  • Al-Shehbaz: 159 (1991)
  • Verdcourt: 86 (1991)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 100, cosmopolitan, mostly in the temperate regions of the Old World, particularly Europe and New Zealand but a few in Africa
• Southern Africa: Species 7, Lesotho and Swaziland