Description:

• Annual herbs, dichotomously branched and diffuse, sometimes rooting at nodes
• Leaves opposite or pseudoverticillate, flat, broad or narrow, sessile to long-petiolate; stipules small, mostly setaceous or composed of subulate segments, persistent or fugaceous
• Inflorescences often terminal or axillary, few- to many-flowered dichasial cymes, or occasionally flowers solitary or clustered in leaf axils
• Flowers bisexual, subperigynous or hypogynous
• Sepals 5, free, herbaceous or with margins translucent
• Petals 5, deeply bifid, white
• Stamens 2-5; filaments flattened, slightly connate at base; anthers subglobose
• Ovary superior, slightly stipitate; carpels mostly 3, 1-locular; ovules 2-many, campylotropous on free-central placenta; styles 1-, 2- to 4-fid to ± middle or to base
• Fruit a capsule, ovoid to spheroid, (2)3-valved
• Seeds 1-many, reniform-globose or compressed, usually tuberculate; embryo surrounding perisperm
• x = 12 (polyploidy)

Classification Notes:

• The position of the genus is dubious, even its placement in subfamily Paronychioideae, as it shows some alsinoid characters and the ontogeny of its stipules differs from that of other Paronychioideae

Nomenclature:

• Drymaria Willd. ex Schult.
  • Schultes: 406 (1819)
  • Sonder: 135 (1860)
  • Pax: 86 (1889)
  • Pax & Hoffmann: 306 (1934)
  • Turrill: 9 (1956)
  • Duke: 173 (1961)
  • Wild: 344 (1961)
  • Wild, Hooper & Diniz: 8 (1973)
  • Bittrich: 220 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 48, mostly restricted to the New World from W United States to Patagonia (46), Galapagos Islands (1); Drymaria cordata (L.) Willd. ex Roem. & Schult., pantropical
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Drymaria cordata (L.) Willd. ex Roem. & Schult., Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape.