Description:

• Perennial herbs with red-tipped roots
• Leaves alternate, serrate or pinnatifid
• Capitula radiate, solitary, pedunculate
• Involucre hemispherical or campanulate
• Receptacle convex or sometimes conical, epaleate
• Ray florets female, fertile; lamina white
• Disc florets bisexual, fertile; corolla yellow, 5-lobed; tube basally swollen and spongy in fruit, especially abaxially
• Anthers ecalcarate and ecaudate; with ovate apical appendage
• Style branches narrowly oblong, truncate, penicillate
• Cypselas ± 10-ribbed with vallecular lacunae and vallecular secretory canals as well as vascular strands between ribs, with myxogenic cells along ribs
• Pappus a corona or an adaxial auricle, sometimes 0
• x = 9 (aneuploids, high polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• *Leucanthemum Mill.
  • Miller: [769] (1754)
  • Heywood: 175 (1976)
  • Hilliard: 348 (1977)
  • Bremer & Humphries: 141 (1993)
  • Bremer: 468 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 33, throughout Europe, 1 species in North Africa, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia
• Southern Africa: Species 1, naturalised as weed: *Leucanthemum vulgare Lam., Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape