Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs, rarely shrubs
• Leaves alternate, rarely also in basal rosette, entire, toothed or rarely dissected
• Capitula disciform or shortly radiate, in few-headed loose corymbs or panicles, rarely subglobosely arranged, rarely solitary
• Involucre ± campanulate; bracts in 2 to many rows, imbricate, linear, usually hairy
• Receptacle flat or slightly convex, epaleate, honeycombed, sometimes with margins of pits produced
• Marginal florets female, fertile, usually in many rows; corolla shorter than style, tubular, filiform, truncate or minutely 2-5-lobed or with long or short lamina, white or pink
• Disc florets bisexual, fertile or some functionally male, tubular, becoming campanulate above, 5-lobed, yellow or white
• Anthers ecalcarate and ecaudate
• Style branches of disc florets narrow and flattened, with broadly triangular appendage, with conspicuous sweeping hairs outside or elliptical with minute sweeping hairs
• Cypselas small, compressed, smooth or 1-nerved on each face
• Pappus of many barbellate bristles in 1 row, rarely in 2 rows, accrescent, ± concealing flowers
• x = 9 (8, 12) (aneuploids, high polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• Conyza Less.
  • Lessing: 203 (1832)
  • Harvey: 111 (1865)
  • Merxmüller: 43 (1967)
  • Wild: 247 (1969)
  • Wild: 35 (1975)
  • Hilliard: 86 (1977)
  • Bremer: 418 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 60, cosmopolitan in warm areas
• Southern Africa: Species 15, 4 introduced, naturalised weeds, widespread