Description:

• Annual herbs, sometimes with wiry branches from base
• Leaves alternate, sometimes radical, sessile, linear to lanceolate, entire or lobed, woolly on lower surface
• Capitula radiate, several-flowered, solitary, terminal or axillary, subsessile
• Involucre ovoid; bracts connate into cup towards base, pungent, ciliate, enclosing fruit after anthesis
• Receptacle basin-shaped, nude, honeycombed, with margins of pits produced
• Ray florets neuter, arising on side of receptacle; corolla yellow or orange, sometimes with dark basal spot and dark dorsal stripe, with tube absent; lamina ± elliptic above and narrowed into a long claw, 2- or 3-toothed
• Disc florets bisexual, fertile or central ones sterile; corolla yellow or orange; tube slightly widened above, with 5 linear or lanceolate lobes
• Anthers shortly sagittate at base; with ovate, apical appendage
• Style linear, subglobose at base with lanceolate or linear-lanceolate branches; those of innermost florets undivided
• Cypselas obovoid, apically sericeous
• Pappus of few narrow setae or ring of minute, hyaline scales or long-ciliate cup, or crown
• Seeds germinating within capitula

Nomenclature:

• Gorteria L.
  • Linnaeus: 1229 (1759)
  • Harvey: 469 (1865)
  • Phillips: 844 (1951)
  • Roessler: 319 (1959)
  • Bremer: 262 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 3, endemic, occurring S Namibia, Northern Cape (Richtersveld, Namaqualand) and ± along the west and southern coastal region of the Western Cape to Humansdorp in the Eastern Cape