Description:

• Biennial or perennial herbs; scapes almost leafless; roots tuberous, usually fleshy, often pencil-like, single or in clusters
• Leaves radical, usually developing after flowering; sometimes large, petiolate, pinnatipartite or multisect, or pinnate with pinnae lobed; cauline leaves scale-like
• Flowers in umbels of many rays; involucres of small bracts
• Calyx with small or obsolete teeth
• Petals elliptic, with inflexed apex, keeled on face
• Disc broadly conical or cushion-like
• Fruit oblong, more than 5 mm long, crowned with calyx teeth and disc, slightly or distinctly winged; mericarps homomorphic or heteromorphic, flat on inner face, prominently veined, when heteromorphic then one 3-ribbed and the other 4-ribbed; ribs sclerified; oil ducts 6, 4 in furrows, 2 on inner face; carpophore bipartite
• Seeds dorsally compressed, terete or concave-convex in cross section, flat or grooved on face

Nomenclature:

• Annesorhiza Cham. & Schltdl.
  • Chamisso & Schlechtendal: 398 (1826)
  • Sonder: 544 (1862)
  • Marloth: 241 (1925)
  • Adamson: 61 (1938)
  • Burtt: 177 (1991)
  • Pimenov & Leonov: 21 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 12, widely distributed in South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland