Clades:
Acanthaceae.
Region: Tropical Africa, southern Africa,
Madagascar, Angola, Botswana, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zaïre. Zimbabwe.
Habitat: lowland, medium altitude woodland, bushland, dry forests.
BotanyShrubby herbs, shrubs.
Leaves: opposite; with visible linear cystoliths.
Inflorescence: spikes or panicles, or in 3-7-flowered, cymules aggregated into long raceme-like cymes.
Flowers: with bracts and narrow, inconspicuous bracteoles; calyx is deeply 5-lobed, with narrow, or linear-lanceolate or filiform lobes, with thread-like tips; corolla-tube is narrowly cylindrical, long, linear, divided into 5 subequal lobes, spreading or reflexed, red, but may be salmon-pink, scarlet or orange-red, hairy and sometimes glandular, on the outside; stamens 2, just exserted, with anthers which are 1-celled; ovary is 2-celled with 2 ovules in each cell or loculus; style filiform.
Fruit: capsule, club-shaped, with solid stalk-like basal part.
ISeeds: smooth; glabrous or variously ornamented; situated on prominent hook-shaped retinaculas (thick fibres), without hygroscopic hairs.
Chromosome count: 2n=2.