Description:

• Spiny, branched shrubs up to 4 m high; young twigs and branchlets spine-tipped
• Bark greyish olive-green becoming rusty brown to grey, smooth to finely fissured to rough; young branchlets olive-green, grooved, smooth when fresh, becoming rugulose
• Leaves fasciculate or scattered, small, glabrous, oblong, linear or elliptical, spine-tipped
• Flowers solitary, but often in pseudoracemes, axillary, purple, pink or white, pedicel present, hirsute; bracts 4, imbricate, cordate, ciliate
• Sepals: 3 outer ones 1-2 mm long, ovate, subobtuse, ciliate, green with purplish pink tips; 2 inner (lateral) ones petaloid, much larger than outer ones, elliptic, wing-like, persistent, pink, purple or white
• Petals 3; anterior one keel-like, enclosing stamens, with a lobed multifid crest (appendages) below apex; lateral ones oblong, as long as anterior one
• Stamens 7; filament tube pilose above; anthers 2-thecous, linear, dehiscing by a longitudinal slit
• Ovary narrowly obovate; style stout, branching at apex into one vertical and one horizontal lobe, stigma on horizontal lobe
• Fruit a rounded drupe, up to 8 mm in diameter, fleshy, red, 1- or 2-seeded
• Seeds sparsely pubescent, without aril; cotyledons small, oblong; endosperm scanty

Nomenclature:

• Nylandtia Dumort.
  • Dumortier: 31 (1822)
  • Bullock: 202 (1965)
  • Johnson & Weitz: 230 (1991)
• Mundia Kunth
  • Kunth: 392 (1823) in part
  • Harvey: 95 (1860) as 'Mundtia'
  • Dyer: 249 (1967)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 1: Nylandtia spinosa (L.) Dumort., Western and Eastern Cape: 2 varieties are recognised: type variety occurs as far north as Nababeep (Namaqualand, Northern Cape) and along south coast to Grahamstown (Eastern Cape); var. scoparia is in the Clanwilliam District (Western Cape)