Rigid, open, divaricately-branched shrub to 60 cm high. Branches brittle, woolly, covered with compact glomerules of leaves. Leaves sessile, fleshy and woolly, those towards apex of elongating branches alternate appressed and deltoid, c. 1.5 mm long, elsewhere minute and in dense glomerules. Flowers solitary but arranged in short terminal spikes, polygamodioecious, woolly. Fruiting perianth thin-walled, pink to red when mature; tube convex, glabrous; wing simple, rarely divided into 5 lobes, horizontal, thin, slightly crenulate, to 15 mm diam., with a single radial (radicular) slit, woolly above; upper perianth convex, deeply 5-lobed, 2 of the lobes with a pair of erect narrowly oblong processes 3–4 mm long, one lobe with a single process, the other two lobes without processes.
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