Description:

• Perennial or annual herbs or shrubs, erect, with stinging and nonstinging hairs; plants monoecious or dioecious
• Leaves alternate, dentate or serrate, 3-nerved from base, petiolate, with linear cystoliths, some species with axillary bulbils; stipules obsolete, rarely intrapetiolar, free or ± connate and bifid, deciduous
• Inflorescences axillary and terminal, cymose-dichotomous panicles or rarely simple racemes, pedunculate
• Flowers unisexual or rarely androgynous, reflexed; bracts 0
• Male flowers usually pedicellate, regular; tepals 4 or 5, distinct, equal; stamens equalling tepals in number; filaments reflexed; rudimentary ovary present, globose or subclavate
• Female flowers pedicellate; pedicel sometimes winged; tepals 2-4, unequal, lateral pair usually much larger than median pair, and median pair of unequal size; staminodes 0; ovary straight when young, becoming oblique; style persistent in fruit, hood-like or elongate; stigma obliquely ovate or linear, becoming inflexed and hooked, shortly papillose, sometimes with 2 minute lobes at base
• Achene stipitate, oblique, laterally compressed, ± orbicular, free from and not enclosed by slightly enlarged tepals
• Seed with a thin coat
• x = 10, 13 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Laportea Gaudich.
  • Gaudichaud-Beaupré: 498 (1830) name conserved
  • Weddell: 121 (1856)
  • Weddell: 77 (1869)
  • Bentham: 383 (1880)
  • Engler: 106 (1888)
  • Chew: 200 (1965)
  • Letouzey: 121 (1968)
  • Chew: 111 (1969)
  • Chew: 72 (1989)
  • Friis: 15 (1989)
  • Friis: 88 (1991)
  • Friis: 620 (1993)
• Fleurya Gaudich.
  • Gaudichaud-Beaupré: 497 (1830)
  • Brown: 545 (1925)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 50, pantropical but extending into temperate regions of North America and East Asia
• Southern Africa: Species 3, Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape