Description:

• Shrubs or small trees, rigid and spiny, much branched from base; branches divaricate, densely stellate-pubescent, but glabrescent, sometimes spine-tipped or reduced to spines
• Leaves simple, opposite, often fascicled, petiolate, densely stellate-pubescent, irregularly toothed to crenate
• Flowers 1 or more, usually 2, terminal or axillary, ± dense in uppermost part of branches, sessile
• Calyx ribbed, tube shortly split down one side; lobes 5(6), filiform, pubescent like leaves
• Corolla sub-bilabiate, 5(6 or 7)-lobed, white, pale green, cream or pink; tube long-cylindrical, becoming funnel-shaped above, many-ribbed, glabrous outside, pilose in lower half; lobes suborbicular, spreading to reflexed
• Stamens as many as corolla lobes, arising below middle of corolla tube, slightly exserted; filaments terete, adnate to tube for ± two-thirds of their length; anthers bluntly apiculate, with thecae connate in upper part, free and parallel to slightly diverging below
• Nectary thick, shallowly cupular, somewhat crenate
• Ovary subglobose, scabrous, bilocular; ovules few in 2 rows per locule; style filiform, exserted; stigma of 2 elliptic-oblong lobes
• Fruit an elliptic, beaked capsule, slightly compressed parallel to septum; walls thick, woody; valves boat-shaped, with short, prickly warts
• Seeds disc-like, with ± surrounding, papery wing

Nomenclature:

• Catophractes D.Don
  • Don: 4 (1839)
  • Sprague: 453 (1904)
  • Verdoorn: t. 1060 (1949)
  • Merxmüller & Schreiber: 2 (1967)
  • Palgrave: 830 (1977)
  • Diniz: 70 (1988)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Monotypic: Catophractes alexandri D.Don, subtropical and southern Africa, also in Angola and Zimbabwe; often associated with limestone
• Southern Africa: Namibia, Botswana, and adjacent parts of South Africa, from ± Messina (Northern Province) to Gordonia (Northern Cape)