Neobotrydium Moldenke; Roubieva Moquin-Tandon; Teloxys Moquin-Tandon.

Herbs annual or short-lived perennial, usually aromatic, covered with stalked, glandular trichomes and/or subsessile or sessile glands and/or uniseriate, multicellular trichomes, sometimes glabrescent. Stems branched, rarely nearly simple, erect, ascending, decumbent, or prostrate. Leaves alternate; leaf blade simple, margin entire, dentate, serrate, or pinnately lobed. Inflorescences terminal and axillary, loosely flowered, simple or compound cymes, spikelike, condensed cymes, or dense, axillary glomerules; bracts absent, but glomerules often subtended by reduced leaves (“leaflike bracts”). Flowers bisexual (rarely functionally unisexual). Perianth segments 1-5, usually united only at base or nearly free, in some species fused to form a sac surrounding utricle. Stamens 1-5. Ovary superior, unilocular with 1 basal ovule; styles 1-3, stigmas 1-3, filiform. Fruit a utricle, often enclosed in perianth; pericarp membranous, non-adherent. Seed 1, horizontal or vertical, subglobose to lenticular; embryo annular or incompletely so, surrounding copious perisperm; radicle inferior or centrifugal.

The generic name Dysphania was traditionally applied to some 7–10 species endemic to Australia. Its taxonomic position, as understood by various authors, was very obscure—from a mere section in Chenopodium to the sole genus of a separate family Dysphaniaceae—but its close affinity to “glandular” species of Chenopodium s.l. is now evident.

Here, the genus Dysphania is accepted in a redefined circumscription, including also all other “glandular” taxa previously treated in Chenopodium subgen. Ambrosia A. J. Scott, or segregated in genera Neobotrydium Moldenke, Roubieva Moquin-Tandon, Teloxys Moquin-Tandon, etc. Dysphania in its traditional circumscription has no distinct characters clearly separating it from other “glandular” species previously placed in C. subgen. Ambrosia (see Mosyakin & Clemants, Ukrayins’k. Bot. Zhurn. 59: 380–385. 2002).

About 30 species: worldwide, mostly from tropics and subtropics to warm-temperate zones; four species (one introduced) in China.