Xerophyta villosa (Baker) L.B.Sm. & Ayensu

Shrub with irregular thick stem base and woody, rarely branched erect stem that is up to 1.5 m high and, including a thick coat of leaf sheaths, up to 5 cm in diameter. Leaf sheaths are about 5 cm long and early disintegrating into parallel wiry fibres. Leaves up to 60 cm long and to 1.2 cm wide, in apical or subapical rosettes, blades V-shaped with median adaxial groove and opposite furrows, deciduous, linear with acuminate tip, falcate, on both sides silvery white as a result of dense long and appressed trichomes as terminal cells of eglandular emergences. Flowers solitary on up to 10-cm-long peduncles. Tepals about 30 mm long, mauve to dark magenta, the outer with trichomes on the back. Stamina with short filaments and 15-mm-long anthers. Style base about 5 mm long, stigma 10 mm long. Ovary about 1.5 cm long, turbinate. Ovary and peduncle densely clothed with the long simple spreading end cells of eglandular emergences that are up to 2 mm long with their bases bulged out like a club (inversely claviform).