Cotyledon (genus)

Cotyledon
Cotyledon orbiculata (grey variety)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
(unranked):	Angiosperms
(unranked):	Eudicots
(unranked):	Core eudicots
Order:	Saxifragales
Family:	Crassulaceae
Genus:	Cotyledon Tourn. ex L. 1753
Species
See text.

See text.

Cotyledon is a genus of succulent plants in the Crassulaceae family. Mostly from Southern Africa, they also occur throughout the drier parts of Africa as far north as the Arabian peninsula.

Members of the genus are shrublets, generally succulent, with fleshily woody, brittle stems and persistent succulent leaves.

The leaves are opposite. Leaf pairs generally are oriented at 90 degrees to their preceding and following pairs, as is common in the family Crassulaceae, but the leaf habit differs from say Tylecodon (in which the leaves are borne in spirals and are deciduous).

The flowers are pendulous and tubular, borne at the tips of stout, rather long peduncles, mainly in short cymes. Calyx 5-partite, corolla 5-lobed. Petals united in a tube or urn that generally is longer than broad, their triangular tips more or less pointed and recurved, 10 stamens arising from corolla near base and projecting or nearly projecting from the corolla. Gynoecium comprises 5 carpels, nearly or quite free, each carpel tapering into a slender style with an obliquely capitate stigma. Each carpel contains many small (typically less than 1 milligramme when ripe) globular, brown seeds.

Until the 1960s there were about 150 species described as being in the genus Cotyledon. However, since then it has been split into at least Adromischus, Dudleya, Rosularia, and Tylecodon, leaving probably less than two dozen species in Cotyledon. Of these, about four are characteristically fynbos plants.

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