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.