Description:

• Annual, biennial or perennial herbs, glabrous or with simple hairs, frequently glaucous
• Leaves with lower ones lyrate-pinnatifid or sometimes only dentate or sinuate; upper leaves usually entire, often sessile and amplexicaul
• Inflorescences terminal, ebracteate racemes
• Sepals erect or spreading, inner somewhat saccate
• Petals clawed, yellow, rarely white
• Stamens 6; filaments without appendages
• Nectaries 4; one ± kidney-shaped gland inside each short filament and an erect, ± conical or tongue-shaped gland in front of each pair of long filaments
• Fruit a narrowly or broadly linear siliqua, terete or ± compressed; valves rather thick, rounded on back, 1-nerved; beak usually prominent, with 1-3 seeds
• Seeds in one row, subglobose, reticulate; cotyledons emarginate, longitudinally folding around incumbent radicle
• x = 9, 10 (7, 8, 11, 12, 17, 19) (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Brassica L.
  • Linnaeus: 666 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 299 (1754)
  • Schulz: 21(1919)
  • Schulz: 321 (1936)
  • Adamson: 409 (1950)
  • Phillips: 350 (1951)
  • Exell: 186 (1960)
  • Heywood: 335 (1964)
  • Marais: 5 (1970)
  • Jonsell: 3 (1982)
  • Jonsell: 64 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 40, mainly Eurasia
• Southern Africa: Species 5, introduced and widely naturalised