Description:

• Erect shrubs to rarely small trees, some with coppice shoots sprouting from lignotubers
• Leaves linear or seldom broadly ovate; petiolate, soft-textured and easily bent at base; dark stipules present; bud leaf colleter a papilla becoming an apiculus, then shrivelling to a black cone or lost
• Flowers borne in dense, spherical to very rarely elongate capitula with a narrowly elliptic to broadly clavate receptacle; flowers in each capitulum 80-130; capitula usually in a corymbose panicle; involucral bracts usually ovate to elliptic, mostly with adnate stipules; floral bracts narrowly elliptic to spathulate, usually without stipules; bracteoles 2; floral receptacle with rounded to angular ribs passing down from the sepals
• Calyx: sepals free, often linear, sometimes broadly oblong, with a dark apiculus
• Corolla white to pale cream or bright red, regular or irregular in lower flowers; petals oblong to narrowly lanceolate or clawed, basally with an adaxial crest; petal margins often with flaps partly enclosing the filaments and lightly adnate to them, forming a tube
• Stamens: immature filaments often arched; anther thecae united or partly free and slightly to strongly divergent; pollen grains tricolporate
• Nectary apparently 0; nectar rarely present at base of flower; scent usually 0, rarely faint or coffee-like or fishy
• Ovary half- to three-quarters-inferior, locules 1 or 2, locules 2 in some peloric flowers, wall between locules often incomplete; ovule 1, rarely 0 or 2 per locule, or ovules sterile as dark flakes in spongy tissue filling locule; styles terete, when 2 then often divergent, stigmas terminal
• Fruit comprising expanded ovary wall and attached persistent flower parts, mostly indehiscent, where not so, valves 2-4 and spreading
• Seeds usually ellipsoid
• x = 10 (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Berzelia Brongn.
  • Brongniart: 370, t. 35 fig. 1 (1826)
  • Sonder: 310 (1862)
  • Pillans: 186 (1947)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 8, Western to Eastern Cape, mainly in the southwestern mountains and flats