Description:

• Perennial herbs, fleshy shrubs or small trees, usually with fleshy or tuberous rootstock, fleshy or succulent stems and branches and caustic milky latex; monoecious
• Leaves alternate, ± fleshy; stipules modified as glands or spines or 0
• Inflorescence axillary, of sessile cyathia in dichotomously branching cymes, cyathia rarely solitary; bracts paired, free or partly united along one edge to form a bract-cup behind and enveloping the involucre, persistent; involucre cup-like, but with opening down one side and with a continuous gland around rim and with 5 fringed lobes within
• Flowers produced within involucres; sepals and petals 0 or rudimentary
• Male flowers in 5 groups, reduced to individual stamens which are arranged in groups opposite involucre lobes; pedicels articulated with filaments, sometimes bracteate
• Female flowers solitary within involucre, surrounded by male flowers, on short or slightly elongated pedicel, with or without much-reduced calyx; ovary recurved and exserted from slit in involucre, 3-locular, with single, pendulous ovule in each locule; styles 3, free or united below, bifid at apex
• Fruit a capsule, 3-angled, with or without a double keel down angles
• Seeds oblong, with a cup-like, pale yellow caruncle, rarely ecarunculate
• x = 17 (12, 19) (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Monadenium Pax
  • Pax: 126 (1894)
  • Burtt Davy: 290 (1932)
  • White, Dyer & Sloane: 941 (1941)
  • Bally: 14 (1961)
  • Carter: 540 (1988)
  • Webster: 129 (1994)
  • Forster: 142 (1996)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 50, Africa
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Monadenium lugardiae N.E.Br., Botswana, Northern Province and KwaZulu-Natal