Commemorating the Italian physician Pietro Andrea Matthioli (1500–77).
Annual or perennial mostly hairy herbs. Flowers; inner sepals with sacs; petals purple, yellow to white; stamens 6, spreading. Fruit a siliqua; valves with 1 mid-vein; style absent; stigmas 2 with long erect horned lobes; seeds in 1 row in each chamber.
At least some hairs star-shaped; flowers mostly relatively large and generally pinkish purple; fruit a siliqua with 2 horned stigma lobes.
About 55 species from C Asia, Europe, S Africa and Macaronesia.
Source: (1997). Brassicaceae. In: . Horticultural Flora of South-eastern Australia. Volume 2. Flowering plants. Dicotyledons. Part 1. The identification of garden and cultivated plants. University of New South Wales Press.