Erect, virgate to 45 cm or so. Stems when, as normally, growing in large colonies amongst Restio in boggy conditions, long and bare. Branches mostly at the top of the stems, rather few, with numerous pubescent, glabrescent, branchlets. Leaves 4-nate, 6-8 mm long (inclusive of petiole), erect-spreading, closely imbricate, linear-acuminate, keeled, faintly sulcate, with a red mucronate tip, glabrous, more or less ciliate. Flowers terminal, subsessile, solitary on short branchlets, more or less clustered together; peduncles 2 mm long, pubescent; bracts median, lanceolate, acuminate, foliaceous, scarious-edged, ciliate with long, soft, hairs and some short, glandular, hairs admixed, sulcate-keeled, concave, mucronate. Sepals 8-9 mm long reaching to more than half the length of the corolla-tube, similar to the bracts but with a broader scarious-edged base. Corolla about 13 mm long, 1 mm wide at the base, cylindrical, widening very slightly upwards, dry, more or less minutely hispidulous, the tube yellowish-green at first, with red, contorted lobes, becoming red from the top down as the flower matures; lobes about 6 mm long, 4 mm wide, stellato-patent, contorted, ovate, the outside red or rosy, the inside with a lineate-granulate indumentum, white but sometimes rosy when the colour appears between the white granules. Filaments very slender; anthers 2/3 mm long, included, basally-dorsifixed, oblong, obtuse, pale brownish-yellow, muticous; pore about half the cell. Ovary ovoid, glabrous; style included; stigma capitate. Flowers late summer and autumn.
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