Description:

• Annual or perhaps perennial herbs; rootless but with root-like appendages; stem short, erect
• Leaves heteromorphic: foliage leaves in basal rosette, ascending, petiolate, spathulate to suborbicular, entire, persistent at time of flowering; pitcher leaves (traps) descending into substrate, consisting of stalk ending in a flask-like trap with a tubular mouth and 2 long, ribbon-like, spirally twisted arms, arms and tube with transverse bands of stiff, reversed hairs on inner side
• Flowers in terminal, peduncled, bracteate racemes; bracteoles 2, at base of pedicels
• Calyx longer than corolla tube, slightly accrescent, with shallow tube and 5 longer, ± lanceolate lobes
• Corolla: upper lip ovate, entire or 2-lobed, smaller of the two; lower lip spurred at base, palate raised, ± 2-gibbous, margin 3-lobed
• Stamens 2; filaments curved and flattened, not much longer than ellipsoid anthers; thecae subdistinct
• Ovary ± globose, with many ovules sessile on a fleshy placenta; style short, indistinct; stigma unequally 2-lipped
• Fruit a capsule, globose to broadly ovoid, circumscissile along equator and sometimes tropics
• Seeds many, ovoid with prominent hilum at one end; testa reticulate

Nomenclature:

• Genlisea A.St.-Hil.
  • Saint-Hilaire: 428 (1833)
  • Stapf: 436 (1904)
  • Taylor: 38 (1988)
  • Cook: 115 (1990)
  • Reut: 101 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 19, tropical America, tropical Afr.
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Genlisea hispidula Stapf; ± eastern half from near Pietersburg (Northern Province) to Port St Johns (Eastern Cape), plus Swaziland; in seasonally or permanently wet grassland