Hermannia

Hermannia is a genus of herbs and shrublets or undershrubs in the Malvaceae or hibiscus family. The genus is diverse in species habits and habitats.

Plant parts like leaves, stems and calyces often have coverings of stellate hairs, i.e. hairs split into a star-shape before their tips, the branches in one plane. A hair or trichome may be a single cell, or a group of cells. The hairs on these plants may also be glandular, consisting of a stalk of variable length supporting a secretory head or tip. The secretion may accumulate inside a vacuole inside the cell, among the cells, or outside the cell wall.

The alternate leaves may have margins that are toothed, entire or variously divided, mostly subtended by leaf-like stipules.

The flowers may be striking in shape and colour, including species that flower yellow, red, orange or pink. The flowers grow from leaf axils or at stem-tips, solitary or in groups. The calyces are five-lobed. There are five petals in a flower, as well as five stamens and five locules in the ovary and capsule. The petals may be sessile or clawed with in-folding margins on the claw, the petal blades spiralling, twisting, sometimes flaring. The filaments of the stamens are more or less attached to each other at the base and winged or cross-shaped. The lance-shaped anthers are variably two-lobed at their tips.

The fruit is a sometimes horned capsule comprising five locules. The seeds are kidney-shaped and usually ribbed.

Of the about 170 accepted Hermannia species on earth, 162 occur in southern Africa, mostly in the winter rainfall region, of which about 60 in the fynbos, 50 in the Little Karoo and 35 in Namaqualand. There are three hermannias in the Americas and at least one in Australia.

Children that spend much time in the veld may learn to eat the flowers (and sometimes the leaves) of certain hermannias, stripping all the soft parts off a stem as broodkos (bread food). Most species are browsed by game and stock.

Some Hermannia species were used in the fight against smallpox long ago. Whether they made a difference is not clear today, but the disease isn't around anymore. Plant parts of some species still feature in traditional medicine, for instance in the treatment of wounds, hence the Afrikaans name pleisterbos (plaster bush) for some species (Leistner, (Ed.), 2000; Manning, 2007; https://pza.sanbi.org; www.sbs.utexas.edu).