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An annual herb. It is erect and grows 0.5-1.6 m high. The stems are wiry and tough. There are lines along the stems. It is branched and bushy. The leave are narrow and 2-10 cm long by 1-3 mm wide. The flowers are like a spike and pink or white. They are 1.2-4 cm long by 0.6-1 cm wide. The fruit is a capsule about 2.5 mm long. It is pear shaped. The seeds are brown and 2.2 mm long. They are shiny with a net pattern on them.
Tepals 2.5–3(4) mm. long, oblong; outer 2 at anthesis firm centrally with a slender, slightly excurrent midrib and 2 pairs of slender lateral nerves (these often branching above), glabrous, increasingly hyaline-margined upwards with the margins inflexed; inner 3 similar but slightly less firm, at least the innermost usually with only one pair of lateral nerves.
Stem wiry and tough, strongly striate with pale ridges, smooth and glabrous throughout or more commonly with whitish multicellular hairs about the somewhat swollen nodes, rarely slightly scabrid on the ridges below the nodes, much-branched and bushy from near the base upwards, the branches divaricate-ascending and frequently with sterile, axillary short shoots.
Inflorescence carmine to pink or whitish, spiciform, 1.2–4 × 0.6–1 cm. in flower, rounded or conical at the apex, elongating in fruit to as much as 20 cm.; axis very densely white-lanate, strongly furrowed but not becoming honeycombed with pits after fruit-fall, densely clad with the persistent bracts.
Leaves linear to linear-filiform, 1.5–9.5 cm. × 0.5–3 (4) mm., glabrous to sparingly pilose (especially when young), occasionally slightly scabrid on the pale and prominent lower surface of the midrib and on the revolute margins, sessile, sharply mucronate at the apex.
Tepals slightly indurate and the outer especially somewhat more prominently 3-nerved in fruit, but never strongly ribbed as in that stage with C. kirkii, nor with the inflorescence appearing spiky.
Bracts 1.25–1.5 mm. long, lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate, membranous with a dark brown, shortly excurrent midrib, glabrous or more commonly basally pilose and sparingly ciliate.
Filaments very slender, 1.5–3 mm. long, the pseudostaminodes finally c. three quarters the length of the filaments, oblong, fimbriate around the apex.
Bracteoles deltoid-ovate, 1.25–1.75 mm. long, membranous with a distinctly excurrent brownish or red midrib, glabrous or sparingly pilose.
Ovary ellipsoid with a dense beard of hairs around the middle, glabrous below and more thinly hairy above.
Annual herb (or probably short-lived perennial in undisturbed ground), erect, mostly 0.5–1.6 m.
Style slender, 1.25–2 mm. long, not asymmetrically placed on the ripe capsule, glabrous.
Seed compressed-ovoid, brown, 2–2.25 mm. long, shining, finely reticulate.
Capsule 2.25–2.5 mm. long, pyriform, compressed.
Flowers solitary in the axils of the bracts.
