Description:

• Shrubs or shrublets, low and spreading or erect, normally arising from a single stem at base
• Leaves alternate or opposite, simple, sessile or shortly petiolate, gland-dotted, glabrous or pubescent
• Flowers terminal, up to 10 mm in diameter, usually much less, shortly pedicellate or sessile, solitary or up to 4-nate or crowded up to 12 together, borne on short branchlets or in much reduced compound racemes; bract 1 per flower; bracteoles 2, usually very much reduced
• Calyx lobes 5, small, persisting, usually minutely ciliolate below with translucent margins
• Petals 5, white or cream or slightly reddened, orbicular, oblong, elliptic, ovate or broadly lanceolate, sessile or sometimes subsessile, connate with lobes of disc, usually spreading
• Stamens 5; filaments 1-2 mm long, acicular, glabrous rarely with a few minute hairs; anthers 5, bilocular, splitting lengthwise, dorsifixed; apical gland sessile, or rarely apex tapering to a recurved gland or gland inflexed; staminodes 0 or seen as a vestigial gland on outer edge of lobes of disc
• Disc well developed, sinuate-crenulate, 5-lobed, fleshy, nectariferous, standing open, much longer than ovary; stigma capitellate; style 0.5-2 mm long, usually at some stage deflexed
• Ovary 5-carpellate, often glandular with the gland persisting and immersed at apex of horn of ripe fruit
• Fruit 5-carpellate; carpels glabrous or rarely puberulous, striate-veined, pilose with gland dots or rarely with warty swellings; horns erect or spreading, long or short
• x = 10 or 15 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Diosma L.
  • Linnaeus: 198 (1753)
  • Williams: 329 (1982)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 28, concentrated in Western Cape and extending eastwards to near Grahamstown (Eastern Cape)