Erica altevirens H.A.Baker

Erect much branched shrublet from a woody rootstock to 30 cm or so. Branches with many delicate branchlets, puberulous when young, later glabrous and marked with the scars from the fallen leaves. Leaves 3-nate, 2-3 mm long, erect-spreading, imbricate, oblong to elliptic, acute, shortly mucronate, obscurely sulcate, glabrous, minutely ciliolate when young. Flowers terminal, mostly 3-nate but, occasionally, 4-nate, often cernuous, sometimes secund, calycine; peduncles 3-4 mm long, often curved, pubigerous; bracts mostly subapproximate but variable and sometimes one or all remote, 1-3 mm long sepal-like but smaller and narrower. Sepals 2.5-3 mm long, narrow to broadish ovate, concave, keeled and keel-tipped, scarious, glabrous, ciliate with variable, caducous setae, coloured, Corolla 3.5-4 mm long, urceolate to subcampanulate-cyathiform, dry, glabrous, white or occasionally pale pink; lobes slightly spreading, acute, about 1/3 the length of the tube. Filaments linear, slender; anthers included, 1 mm long, subterminal, narrow-oblong, deeply bipartite, oblique at the base where the cells are united, chestnut-brown, crested; pore about half the length of the cell; crests 0.6 mm long, pendulous, fixed near the base of the lobes, broad but narrowing to a tooth at the apex, variously toothed. Ovary globose to depressed-globose, glabrous; style included; stigma capitellate. Flowering season, midsummer.