Description:

• Sprawling shrubs, up to 400 mm high, 700 mm in diameter; stems light-coloured
• Leaves opposite, connate at bases, ascending-spreading, club-shaped with rounded tips, light green to greyish, surfaces smooth, waxy
• Flowers solitary or in threes, shortly pedicelled with pink bracts
• Sepals 5, nearly equal, sometimes with narrow, membranous margins
• Petals 2-seriate, obtuse or subacute, light violet and creamy white, with distinct colour pattern: a dark area at the tip with a thin dark line running down to base, where it broadens and darkens, dark bases of all petals forming a clearly demarcated ring surrounded by a creamy whitish region, resulting in a characteristic star-like pattern
• Stamens conically arranged; filaments often papillate; staminodes papillate
• Nectary a crenulate ring
• Ovary slightly conical above; placentas parietal; stigmas 5, subulate, purple
• Fruit a capsule, whitish, often filled with spongy tissue, 5-locular with locules deep and narrow, obconical, once open does not close again; valves with rectangular wings (as in Lampranthus type); expanding keels diverging, touching at their bases; covering membranes with closing rodlets or thick closing ledges on distal undersurfaces; closing bodies small, white, endocarpal, sometimes deep in the locule
• Seeds subglobose or slightly narrowed to one end, brown, glossy

• Flowering in summer

• Distinguishing characters:
  • White-stemmed shrubs
  • Fruit with valve wings, without covering membranes
  • Flowers with star-like colour pattern

Nomenclature:

• Amphibolia L.Bolus
  • Bolus: 169 (1965)
  • Herre: 70 (1971)
  • Toelken & Jessop: 64 (1976)
  • Hartmann & Dehn: 179 (1989)
  • Hartmann: 34 (1996)
  • Hartmann: 44 (1998)
  • Smith et al.: 316 (1998)
• Eberlanzia Schwantes
  • Schwantes: 189 (1926), in part
  • Hartmann & Stüber: 63 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 5, coastal plains of Namibia between Lüderitz and Oranjemund and southwards to Namaqualand in the Northern Cape, to the Cape Peninsula in the Western Cape