Description:

• Annual, biennial or perennial herbs or shrubs, scabrid, hispid or canescent
• Leaves alternate or whorled, sessile or petiolate, densely hairy
• Flowers in unilateral, simple or forked scorpioid cymes; bracts small or foliaceous
• Calyx divided into 5 short segments; usually accrescent
• Corolla blue or purplish blue, bilabiate; tube broadly to narrowly funnel-shaped, straight, ± hairy outside, inside usually with a ring of 5-10 distinct scales or lobes or an undulate, entire, somewhat fleshy, collar-like membrane at base; throat ± oblique, open; with 5 short, obtuse lobes
• Stamens sometimes unequal, 2 arising near base of corolla tube, 3 higher up, the longer ones exserted; filaments linear, glabrous or with a few, long hairs; anthers versatile
• Disc present
• Ovary 4-lobed, with a single ovule in each locule; gynobase disc-like; style gynobasic, exserted, linear, 2-fid; stigmas obtuse
• Fruit of 4 nutlets; nutlets convex on one face, bluntly keeled on other, usually rugose
• x = 8 (7, 6) (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Echium L.
  • Linnaeus: 139 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 175 (1754)
  • Candolle: 13 (1846)
  • Bentham: 863 (1876)
  • Boissier: 204 (1879)
  • Gürke: 128 (1897)
  • Wright: 43 (1904)
  • Riedl: 213 (1967)
  • Gibbs: 97 (1972)
  • Al-Shehbaz: 137 (1991)
  • Verdcourt: 81 (1991)
  • Retief & Van Wyk: 167 (1998)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 60, mainly endemic in Madeira, the Azores and Canary Islands, but also in Africa and Asia
• Southern Africa: Species 2, naturalised: *Echium plantagineum L. and *E. vulgare L., Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Western and Eastern Cape