Description:

• Shrublets with greyish-woolly branches
• Leaves alternate, often of 2 sizes, sessile, ericoid, often pungent, usually twisted, with margins often incurved
• Capitula discoid, 3-8(-13)-flowered, crowded at ends of branchlets, sessile or subumbellate, rarely solitary; florets bisexual, fertile or some sterile
• Involucral bracts with undivided stereome, narrowly campanulate or cylindric; bracts in 4-6 rows, outer bracts oblong, usually acuminate, woolly on back, innermost bracts linear, with large, white or coloured appendage at apex
• Receptacle epaleate
• Ray florets 0
• Disc florets cylindric, becoming subcampanulate upwards, thick-textured, often reddish on upper part with 5 small, deltoid, whitish, glabrous lobes
• Anthers tailed at base, with a lanceolate, apical appendage
• Style linear, swollen at base, branches truncate or slightly rounded, sweeping hairs extending briefly down backs of branches, stigmatic areas separated, sometimes joined at tip
• Cypselas oblong or elliptic, ribbed or angled, often asymmetrical, rarely somewhat winged, tapered at both ends, glabrous or papillate; annulus 0
• Pappus of many scabrid bristles in 1 row, tips flattened and ± clavate, as long as corolla
• x = 7

Nomenclature:

• Metalasia R.Br.
  • Brown: 124 (1817)
  • Harvey: 265 (1865)
  • Pillans: 47 (1954)
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 218 (1981)
  • Karis: 1 (1989)
  • Anderberg: 73 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 332 (1994)
• Endoleuca Cass.
  • Cassini: 47 (1819)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 52, 47 species endemic to the Western Cape
  • Metalasia muricata (L.) D.Don and M. trivialis Karis in Western and Eastern Cape
  • M. aurea D.Don and M. massonii S.Moore in Eastern Cape
  • M. densa (Lam.) Karis, widespread in Northern Province, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Western and Eastern Cape