Plants perennial flechy herbs or shrubs, often with tuberous roots. Leaves entire, serrate-lacerate, or reduced and scale-like. Heads solitary of few together, in corymbose clusteres, discoid; phyllaries forming one series, usually with an outer whorl of shorter bracts forming a calyculus; receptacles without bracts. Flowers yellow, orange, red, purplish, white, or greeenish, tubular-campanulate, (4-)5-lobed; pappuses of many slender, barbellate bristles; styles branches with contical to elongate, papillose terminal appendages. Achenes oblong, ribbed, pappuses remaining attached.
Kleinia includes aobut 40 species, most of which grow in tropical Africa but extending west to the Canary Islands, south to South Africa, and east to India and Sri Lanka.
