Description:

• Soft, annual, glabrous herbs, climbing with tendriliform ultimate leaflets
• Inflorescence: pedicels short; bracts small, partly scarious
• Flowers 2-lipped, white or rosy pink
• Sepals lateral, persistent, much shorter than petals, scale-like
• Petals free at base, partly connate at tips, posterior one prolonged into a very short, obtuse spur; tube when present shortly campanulate
• Stamens 6, in 2 groups, filaments of each group variously fused, lateral, 3-fid
• Ovary sometimes shortly and bluntly stalked, elliptic or oblong, with 2 narrow keels; ovules many; style linear; stigma ± capitate, sometimes deeply cleft or with 2 simple papillae
• Fruit a membranous capsule (vesicular in C. vesicaria (L.) Fedde), thin-walled, inflated, ovoid, up to about 30 mm long, splitting from apex
• Seeds many, small, lenticular, with a black, shiny testa, without elaiosomes
• x = 7, 8 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Cysticapnos Mill.
  • Miller: [427] (1754)
  • Endlicher: 860 (1839)
  • Harvey: 16 (1860) under Corydalis
  • Fedde: 285 (1924)
  • Fedde: 136 (1936)
  • Adamson: 405 (1950)
  • Lidén: 105 (1986)
  • Lidén: 316 (1993)
• Phacocapnos Bernh.
  • Bernhardi: 664 (1838)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 5, confined to S Namibia, Mpumalanga, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Northern Cape (Namaqualand, including Richtersveld), Western and Eastern Cape