Plants herbaceous, annuals or short-lived perennials, aromatic, with glandular hairs and subsessile glands. Stems erect ascending, decumbent, or prostrate, branched. Leaves alternate, petiolate; blade fairly thin, lanceolate, oblanceolate, ovate or elliptic, often pinnately lobed; margins entire, dentate or serrate. Inflorescences terminal and axillary, without bracts, of loose, compound cymes, or glomerules arranged spicately and often subtended by reduced leaf-like bracts. Flowers usually bisexual, rarely unisexual; perianth segments 1–5, mostly free nearly to the base and later loosely covering the fruit, or fused to form a sac surrounding the fruit, sometimes becoming whitish but otherwise unchanged; margins membranous or herbaceous, back roundish to keeled (rarely cristate); stamens 1–5; stigmas 1–3. Fruit with membranous, nonadherent pericarp. Seeds horizontal or vertical, subglobose to lenticular, ovoid, margin obtuse to truncate; testa reddish brown or black, smooth to rugose or reticulate.
Dysphania includes about 45 species. It is a cosmopolitan weed. The Flora of Somalia mentions and provides a key to two species reported to grow in Somaliland, but the authors state that they had not seen specimens from there.
Key to the species of Dysphania reported to grow in Somaliland.
Note: GBIF records include introduced and cultivated plants. Consequently, the distribution shown often differs from statements about a taxon's native distribution.
Fuentes-Bazan S., P. Uotila & T. Borsch (2012) A novel phylogeny-based generic classification for Chenopodium sensu lato, and a tribal rearrangement of Chenopodioideae (Chenopodiaceae). Willdenowia 42: 5 – 24. June 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.3372/wi42.42101.