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Annuals or perennials, usually hairy, hairs frequently glandular. Leaves in a basal rosette, linear to subulate or acicular, woolly in the axils. Scapes usually 3-ribbed; sheaths obliquely slit. Capitulum scarious, white or brown, pilose to almost glabrous; involucral bracts in several series, glabrous or softly ciliate on the margins, sometimes also on the back, the inner hyaline and subtending flowers; floral bracts absent; receptacle woolly with long hairs surrounding the flowers; flowers trimerous, pedicellate, the pedicels villous. Male flowers: sepals lanceolate, lightly keeled, connate below the middle into an infundibular tube with free lobes; petals completely connate into a membranous, subtruncate tube; stamens 3, filaments adnate to the inside of the corolla, extended above the corolla-rim and bearing 3 white or yellowish anthers; rudimentary gynoeceum at base of corolla-tube, 3-branched, the branches with swollen glandular tips; after anthesis the filaments collapsing inwards and the corolla-tube closing over the anthers. Female flowers: sepals free, otherwise resembling the male; petals delicate, usually pilose, connate near the tips, the clawed bases free, the small free apical lobes incurled; ovary 3-carpellate, the carpels protruding between the free petal-bases, style forming a hollow tube divided at the tip into 3 long stigmatic branches usually with 3 alternating swollen-tipped glandular appendages, these appendages entangling with the incurled petal-tips after anthesis to form a clavate structure. Seeds plumply ellipsoid to cylindrical, usually longitudinally white-striate.
Stems very short or elongate, sterile or fertile, simple or branched; roots rather thick or incrassate, porous, whitish; heads pilose or subglabrate, the hairs always acute and smooth; receptacular bractlets almost always none; florets trimerous; sepals mostly free or almost so; staminate florets with the petals connate into an infundibular, 3-lobed, glabrous, finally almost always involute (rarely 3-parted) tube and the anthers 4-celled, composed of 2 thecae; pistillate florets with the petals connate by their margins at or above the middle, the base and apex free, the apex finally mostly involute; style terete, its appendages non-papillose, some-times obsolete; stigmas simple, inserted at the same height on the style as its appendages.
