Trachyandra patens Oberm.

Plants up to 40 cm high. Roots forming one tuber in young plants increasing to many separate tubers with age, often narrowed above where attached to rhizome, with numerous straggling, lanate rootlets. Rhizome small. Older plants producing 4-7 shoots. Squamae, the outer firm, brown, forming a long, narrow neck around shoot; inner thin, pale membranous. Leaves about 3 per shoot, filiform, up to 35 cm long, c.1 mm broad, erect, straight or wavy (especially so when young when the upper half forms a corkscrew curl), sparsely pubescent or glabrous. Inflorescence a patent, divaricate, many flowered raceme with accessory branches in many of the axils; at first overtopping the young leaves, later, when the latter are full grown, more or less equal in length; scape up to 24 cm long, minutely pubescent below; bracts small, ovate, apiculate, membranous, white; pedicels patent or patent-ascending up to 1 cm long. Flowers with brown keeled, maculate perianth segments up to 1 cm long; filaments white, scabrous, the 3 inner bearded at the base, yellow in lower half (vide Marloth); ovary with 10 ovules per cell. Capsule globose, 3 mm. Seeds verrucose.