Audouinia esterhuyseniae (Powrie) A.V.Hall

An erect shrub, usually about 50 cm high, with numerous ascending branches arising from a woody base and coppicing after fire, with a similar habit of growth to Audouinia capitata (L.) Brogniart. Branches densely clothed in spirally inserted leaves, becoming woody towards the base with dark brown bark covered in leaf scars. Leaves 5-6 mm long, ascending, imbricate, slightly incurved, linear-lanceolate, trigonal, scabrid with minute hairs along the margins at first, becoming glabrous, sessile, with minute pale deciduous stipules and a dark apical mucro. Flowers axillary in dense subterminal racemes usually 20 mm long, but occasionally up to 50 mm long. Buds of the next season’s flowering already present at the tips of the branches at the time of flowering. Flowers 5-6 mm long, shortly pedicellate, surrounded by 9-10 creamy-yellow, lanceolate, scaphoid bracts, 1 x 5-2 mm long, fringed with small hairs and with an apical dark mucro. Sepals 3 mm long, lanceolate, scaphoid, creamy-yellow with a dark apex and a few small hairs along the apical margin. Receptacle warty and glabrous. Petals 4 mm long, white, narrowly ovate, with two diminutive keels at the base and curving outwards at the apex over the imbricate sepals. Stamens 3 x 5 mm long, included, with lanceolate anthers 0-75 mm long on stout filaments. Ovary almost completely inferior, bilocular with 2 ovules in each locule, the apex of the ovary being ridged, glabrous and bright green. Style double but completely connate to the apical stigma. Fruit (immature and infertile) ovoid, warty, apparently indehiscent, imbricated by the persistent bracts and crowned by the old floral parts. Large numbers of fruits were examined but no fertile seed was found, only a spongy proliferation of the septum such as is usual in unfertilised fruits of the Bruniaceae.