Description:

• Deciduous bulbous herbs
• Bulb usually with a neck of old leaf bases
• Leaves 1-few, usually following flowering, slender, glabrous, sometimes spiralled
• Inflorescence 1-flowered; scape reduced, mostly shorter than bulb-neck; spathe lanceolate, sheathing
• Flower regular, white, fugacious; pedicel reduced
• Tepals connate into a long, usually very slender, cylindric tube somewhat dilated towards mouth; segments subequal, ascending, much shorter than tube
• Stamens in 2 series, 3 arising in perigone throat and 3 below throat; filaments filiform, short, free to base; anthers linear, basifixed in inner series, dorsifixed in outer series, ± as long as filaments
• Ovary enclosed within spathe and bulb-neck; ovules many per locule; style filiform; stigma apical, obscurely 3-lobed
• Fruit indehiscent, clavate and succulent or ellipsoid with thin walls, rupturing irregularly
• Seeds globose, dark or with a translucent outer layer; embryo green
• x = 6

Nomenclature:

• Apodolirion Baker
  • Baker: 74 (1878)
  • Baker: 197 (1896)
  • Burtt: 87 (1970)
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 304 (1973)
  • Müller-Doblies: 466 (1986)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species ± 6, endemic, ranging from Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Swaziland and Free State to KwaZulu-Natal, the Western and Eastern Cape