Description:

• Erect to slightly spreading shrubs, some with coppice shoots sprouting from lignotubers after fires; sparse branching mainly from nodal zones
• Leaves narrowly elliptic to elliptic or obovate, sessile and generally glabrous, margins flat to strongly incurved; stipules 0; bud leaf colleter erect to distally curved, shrivelling to a minute black apiculus, or lost
• Flowers in a racemose spike; bracts appressed, elliptic to obovate or clawed, channelled; bracteoles present; floral receptacle minute
• Calyx tubular below; segments subulate to broadly ovate
• Corolla white to pink or purple; petal bases connate with stamens to form a tube; free parts of petals obovate, or narrowly so, or elliptic, spreading, glabrous, lacking crests next to ovary
• Stamens arising from top of corolla tube; anther thecae partly free; pollen grains with 5-10 colpi
• Nectary 0; scent not recorded
• Ovary fully superior to two-thirds inferior; locules 2, placed dorsiventrally to obliquely to bract stem plane, sometimes with an interlocular passage; placentas, when parietal, T-shaped, when axile then with 1 or 2 placental ridges in each locule, bearing 2-16 ovules; style distally branched
• Fruit not recorded
• x = 11 (1 report, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Lonchostoma Wikstr.
  • Wikström: 350, t. 10 (1818)
  • Sonder: 316 (1862)
  • Pillans: 133 (1947)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 5, Western Cape, rare in mountains from Cederberg southwards