Description:

• Perennial herbs or subshrubs with long, slender, erect, climbing or reclining stems, often much branched and woody towards base
• Leaves opposite in subequal pairs, often fleshy, usually entire or repand, raphides often visible on inferior surface in dried state, petiolate
• Inflorescences umbellate, verticillate, irregularly branched or mixed, pedunculate
• Flowers bisexual, small, usually pedicellate, fugacious; each pedicel bracteate; bracts caducous
• Perianth: tube with few or many prominent glands on portion surrounding ovary; lobes 5
• Stamens 2-5(6), exserted; filaments filiform, often unequal, connate into short sheath at base; anthers 2-thecous
• Ovary ellipsoid, often stipitate; ovule solitary; style filiform, long-exserted; stigma capitate
• Fruit enclosed in persistent base of perianth (anthocarp); anthocarp cylindrical, fusiform, clavate or turbinate, ± 10-sulcate, studded with variously arranged, large, viscid, sessile or stipitate glands scattered over its surface
• Seed with scanty endosperm; embryo hooked

Nomenclature:

• Commicarpus Standl.
  • Standley: 373 (1909)
  • Heimerl: 115 (1934)
  • Webb: 111 (1964)
  • Schreiber: 4 (1969)
  • Meikle: 235 (1978)
  • Stannard: 15 (1988)
  • Bittrich & Kühn: 482 (1993)
  • Whitehouse: 8 (1996)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 32, mainly in Africa, except the extreme north and south, but also in warm regions of Europe (S Spain), Asia (Burma, Malaysia, South China), Australia, North and South America
• Southern Africa: Species 9, widespread in subtropical parts in arid habitats, in all the provinces and countries except Lesotho and Western Cape