Description:

• Annual, biennial or perennial herbs or shrublets, glabrous or pubescent, with simple hairs
• Leaves variable, simple to 1-4-pinnatipartite, sessile or petiolate, cuneate or amplexicaul, margins entire to serrate-dentate or lobate; basal leaves usually rosulate and differing in shape from cauline leaves
• Inflorescences terminal or axillary racemes, corymbose at first, contracting or elongating in fruit, dense or lax
• Flowers minute; pedicels appressed or wide-spreading
• Sepals equal, not saccate at base, deciduous or persistent
• Petals present or 0, often much reduced
• Stamens 2-6; filaments long; anthers exserted
• Nectaries tuberculate or elongate, filiform
• Fruit a silicula, dehiscent, dorsally compressed, oblong, ovate, obovate, elliptical, obcordate or subcircular, angustiseptate, 2-valved, emarginate at apex and style included in sinus, or not (or hardly) emarginate with style exserted; valves boat-shaped, keeled or winged, falling away empty and seeds falling free
• Seeds 1(2) per locule, pendulous, finely reticulate, mucilaginous, elliptic to obovate, sometimes narrowly winged; cotyledons incumbent, sometimes oblique, entire or tripartite
• x = 4, 8 (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Lepidium L.
  • Linnaeus: 643 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 291 (1754)
  • Sonder: 28 (1860)
  • Schulz: 407 (1936)
  • Adamson: 419 (1950)
  • Phillips: 348 (1951)
  • Exell: 190 (1960)
  • De Carvalho e Vasconcellos: 330 (1964)
  • Schreiber: P48:8-4 (1966)
  • Marais: 83 (1970)
  • Jonsell: 20 (1975)
  • Jonsell: 17 (1982)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 150, cosmopolitan in temperate and subtropical regions of the world
• Southern Africa: Species 17 (2 introduced), widespread