Description:

• Dwarf, stemless perennials, forming mats, often sunken in the soil; rhizome and adventitious roots slightly thickened and fleshy
• Leaves alternate, 5(7 on each stem or branch, growing up to ground level, tiny (length < 10 mm), terete, with a distinct, flat, windowed top; sides of leaves papillate
• Flowers solitary, sessile or subsessile from among leaves, ± 25 mm in diameter, with a hypanthium
• Sepals 5, resembling leaves, united into a short tube above ovary
• Petals in several series, shortly connate at base, purple to white; opening mid-morning, open until mid-afternoon
• Stamens ± 3-seriate, papillate; with an outer series of epapillate staminodes
• Nectary of 5 separate crenulate glands
• Ovary slightly conical above; placentas parietal; stigmas 5 or 6, short, stout, acute
• Fruit a 5- or 6-locular capsule, of Delosperma type but without valve wings; valves only rising to a ± erect position, margins of valves recurved when open; expanding keels parallel, with small wings and diverging tips; very fragile, breaking up when wet, ripe or moistened or rolling as tumble fruit to disperse seeds
• Seeds small, minutely tuberculate

• Flowering spring to summer

• Distinguishing characters:
  • Plants mostly underground with windowed tips visible
  • Leaf surfaces with visible bladder cell idioblasts in rows
  • Flowers with a series of filamentous staminodes
  • Capsule 5- or 6-locular

Nomenclature:

• Frithia N.E.Br.
  • Brown: 433 (1925)
  • Herre: 160 (1971)
  • Hammer: 199 (1989)
  • Zimmermann: 7 (1996)
  • Smith et al.: 102 (1998)
  • Burgoyne et al.: 1 (2000)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 2, summer-rainfall areas in the northeastern part of South Africa. It has been collected on the Magaliesberg range to the west of Gauteng in the North-West and is also known from the vicinity of Bronkhorstspruit and Witbank, straddling the boundary between Gauteng and Mpumalanga