Description:

• Shrubs or subshrubs, glandular
• Leaves usually small and ericoid, involute, margins entire, covered with matted hairs
• Synflorescences in spikes, panicles or globose heads, terminal
• Capitula discoid, 1-6-flowered
• Involucral bracts imbricate in few rows, inner scarious, outer sometimes woolly hairy, often leafy
• Receptacle conical, small, naked
• Florets tubular, usually inconspicuous, 5-lobed, lobes erect or spreading
• Anthers apically acuminate, basally tailed
• Style bifid, branches pencilled at summit
• Nectary 0
• Cypselas small, terete or subterete, often with a well-developed annulus, surface glabrous, or short-hairy, with longitudinal or transverse ribs
• Pappus bristles several, plumose at tip and usually fused in a ring at base

Nomenclature:

• Elytropappus Cass.
  • Cassini: 199 (1816)
  • Lessing: 342 (1832)
  • Harvey: 273 (1865)
  • Bentham: 323 (1873)
  • Levyns: 89 (1935)
  • Anderberg: 75 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 331 (1994)
• Cyathopappus Sch.Bip.
  • Schultz 'Bipontius': 27 (183) (1861).
• Achyrocome Schrank
  • Schrank: 147, 170 (1824)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 8, endemic, centre of distribution in Western Cape, Elytropappus rhinocerotis (L.f.) Less. extending to Northern and Eastern Cape