Matthiola torulosa Dc.

Perennial shrublets, stunted and almost cushion-like or spreading-erect, branched, up to 45 cm high; lower dead leaves or leaf-bases persistent; all vegetative parts as well as sepals, ovary and fruit densely covered and grey with stellate and subsimple hairs and scattered with stalked glands, less dense with age. Leaves 1.5-7 cm long, 1.5-6 mm broad, linear-oblanceolate, entire, subentire, remotely repand-dentate or shallowly sinuately few-lobed, rarely pinnatifid, with 2-3 pairs of narrow upward-pointing lateral lobes and an oblong terminal lobe, rounded. Sepals 5.5-8 mm long, 0.8-1.5 mm broad, linear to linear-oblong, with narrow membranous margins, subpersistent. Petals 6.5-10 mm long, 1-1.5 mm broad, narrowly spathulate; claw membranous, as long as the sepals; blade bent outwards, thicker, its margin wavy. Filaments 2.8-3.8 mm and 4-5 mm long, the 4 long ones obliquely dilated in the lower half. Siliquae 3.5-7 cm long, linear, terete, submoniliform, erect-spreading, sub-sessile; valves 1-nerved, stellately hairy and glandular; stigma subsessile, 2-lobed, the lobes erect, thickened or the outer swollen part of each lobe developing into a very short horn, the fruit then being tricuspidate. Seeds 1.3-1.4 x 0-9 mm, broadly oblong, subcompressed.