Description:

• Perennial herbs or subshrubs, aromatic, often canescent
• Leaves alternate, incised or variously pinnately dissected
• Capitula disciform, small, mainly pendulous, in racemose panicles, few-flowered
• Involucre ovoid or broadly campanulate; bracts in few rows with scarious margins
• Receptacle flat, convex or hemispherical, epaleate, sometimes pilose
• Marginal florets female, fertile; corolla narrowly tubular, sometimes swollen below, 2- or 3-toothed
• Disc florets bisexual, fertile or functionally male; corolla yellow, cylindric, sometimes narrowed or swollen at base, sometimes dilated above, 5-lobed
• Anthers ecalcarate and ecaudate or minutely pointed at base; apical appendage deltoid, sometimes subulate-acuminate
• Style of female florets linear, truncate, penicillate; of bisexual florets linear or linear-spathulate, usually penicillate; undivided in functionally male florets
• Cypselas subglobose, smooth, 2-ribbed or multistriate, thin-walled, occasionally hairy
• Pappus 0
• x = 9 (8, 13, 17) (aneuploids, high polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• Artemisia L.
  • Linnaeus: 845 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 367 (1754)
  • Harvey: 169 (1865)
  • Tutin, Persson & Gutermann: 178 (1976)
  • Hilliard: 360 (1977)
  • Bremer & Humphries: 120 (1993)
  • Bremer: 458 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 388, mainly northern hemisphere but few species in South America, Africa and Hawaiian Islands
• Southern Africa: Species 2: Artemisia afra Jacq. ex Willd. (indigenous) and *A. vulgaris L. (naturalised), widespread but absent from Northern Cape