Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs or shrublets; stems erect or decumbent, often several from crown, rarely one, usually simple below, branched above; hairs on stems, leaves, bracts and calyx with sculptured walls
• Leaves opposite or alternate, sometimes becoming alternate above, fascicled or not, linear or narrowly to broadly elliptic, entire or few-dentate, herbaceous to thick (almost terete)
• Flowers bracteate, pedicellate, grouped in small, congested or lax racemes, usually panicled, sometimes solitary
• Bracts usually adnate to pedicel only, sometimes to extreme base of calyx tube as well
• Calyx campanulate, subequally 5-lobed to ± halfway; lobes deltoid or oblong, anterior ones slightly larger than other 3, pubescent on outside and margins, rarely inside
• Corolla bilabiate, 5-lobed, herbaceous; tube funnel-shaped, usually glabrous; limb glabrous on inner face, yellow-orange patch running down back of throat; posterior lip 2-lobed, glabrous, exterior in bud; anterior lip 3-lobed
• Stamens 4, didynamous, arising ± in middle of corolla tube; posterior filaments decurrent down corolla tube; anthers synthecate, posterior ones in throat or mouth, or shortly or (rarely) well exserted, anterior ones shortly to well exserted; staminodes 0
• Nectary small, on posterior side of ovary base
• Ovary unilocular by complete or partial abortion of posterior locule, ellipsoid; ovule single, pendulous; style filiform, merging into lingulate stigma with marginal papillae
• Fruit a smooth, hard-walled, somewhat beaked, single-seeded, indehiscent coccus, convex on outer face, concave on inner, held within persistent calyx, apparently shed as a unit with bract
• Seeds probably fusiform

Nomenclature:

• Globulariopsis Compton
  • Compton: 309 (1931)
  • Compton: 135 (1943)
  • Hartley & Balkwill: 471 (1990)
  • Hilliard: 318 (1990)
  • Hilliard: 1 (1999)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 7, endemic to Western Cape, mostly in the southwestern mountains