Amphibolia

Sprawling shrubs, up to 400 mm high, 700 mm in diameter; stems light-coloured. Leaves opposite, connate at bases, ascending-spreading, club-shaped with rounded tips, light green to greyish, surfaces smooth, waxy. Flowers solitary or in threes, shortly pedicelled with pink bracts. Sepals 5, nearly equal, sometimes with narrow, membranous margins. Petals 2-seriate, obtuse or subacute, light violet and creamy white, with distinct colour pattern: a dark area at the tip with a thin dark line running down to base, where it broadens and darkens, dark bases of all petals forming a clearly demarcated ring surrounded by a creamy whitish region, resulting in a characteristic star-like pattern. Stamens conically arranged; filaments often papillate; staminodes papillate. Nectary a crenulate ring. Ovary slightly conical above; placentas parietal; stigmas 5, subulate, purple. Fruit a capsule, whitish, often filled with spongy tissue, 5-locular with locules deep and narrow, obconical, once open does not close again; valves with rectangular wings (as in Lampranthus type); expanding keels diverging, touching at their bases; covering membranes with closing rodlets or thick closing ledges on distal undersurfaces; closing bodies small, white, endocarpal, sometimes deep in the locule. Seeds subglobose or slightly narrowed to one end, brown, glossy. F lowering in summer. D istinguishing characters: white-stemmed shrubs; fruit with valve wings, without covering membranes; flowers with star-like colour pattern.