Description:

• Annual or perennial, erect or diffuse herbs, rarely woody at base, usually many-stemmed, sometimes viscid, raphides often present in all parts; stems slender, glabrous or pubescent, often with glandular rings about internodes
• Leaves opposite, commonly in pairs of unequal size at each node, often fleshy, entire or repand, petiolate or sessile
• Inflorescences terminal and axillary, paniculate, umbellate or cymose, sometimes diffuse, pedunculate; bracteoles 1 or 2, minute, caducous
• Flowers bisexual, small, solitary or glomerate, subsessile to pedicellate, fugacious
• Perianth: tube variable in length, lower portion constricted above ovary, cylindrical to obconical, upper portion petaloid, coloured, campanulate, caducous after anthesis, with lower part persistent and becoming hardened in fruit, sometimes glandular; lobes 5
• Stamens 1-4(-6), exserted or included, unequal; filaments filiform, shortly connate below; anthers usually subglobular
• Ovary ellipsoid, oblique, shortly stipitate; style filiform, exserted or included; stigma capitate or peltate
• Fruit enclosed in lower portion of perianth (anthocarp); anthocarp fusiform, valvate or turbinate, conspicuously 3-5-sulcate, symmetrical, glabrous or glandular pubescent, often viscid; ribs rounded, acute or winged, usually mucous when wet
• Seed with scanty endosperm; embryo hooked
• x = 13 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Boerhavia L.
  • Linnaeus: 3 (1753) 'Boerhaavia'
  • Linnaeus: 9 (1754)
  • Jussieu: 91 (1789)
  • Brown: 422 (1810)
  • Choisy: 449 (1849)
  • Hooker: 5 (1880)
  • Heimerl: 26 (1889)
  • Baker & Wright: 2 (1909)
  • Cooke: 393 (1910)
  • Standley: 204 (1918)
  • Burtt Davy: 209 (1926)
  • Heimerl: 117 (1934)
  • Stemmerik: 452 (1964) in part
  • Codd: 113 (1966)
  • Schreiber: 1 (1969)
  • Fosberg: 1 (1978)
  • Stirton: 79 (1982)
  • Stannard: 20 (1988)
  • Bittrich & Kühn: 481 (1993)
  • Thulin: 169 (1993)
  • Whitehouse: 2 (1996)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 20, in almost all tropical and subtropical areas of the world, mostly in North America; several are cosmopolitan weeds
• Southern Africa: Species 7, fairly widespread throughout warm, arid regions, often found in disturbed areas, Namibia, Botswana, Northern Province, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern, Western (only Beaufort-West District) and Eastern Cape