Usually every rosette carries several slender, felty, pinkish, leafless, erect scapes of up to 13 cm, sometimes swollen beneath the single flower head.

Each ray floret is 1–2½ cm long, 2–6 mm wide, entire or sometimes with mostly one to three teeth at the tip and mostly four or five veins, hairless or with scattered multicellular hairs on the lower surface.

[2] The one-seeded indehiscent fruits are not embedded in the common base of the florets receptacle, is inverted cone-shaped or oblong, has three or four ribs, is at least 3 mm long, and half as wide, with a smooth surface or with tiny wrinkles and hairless.

[2] In 1848 Carl Heinrich "Bipontinus" Schultz described Schnittspahnia rueppellii, which he assigned to the Annonaceae, based on a specimen that was collected by Eduard Rüppell and Georg Wilhelm Schimper, from high elevations in the Semien Mountains in Ethiopia, and now reside in the Kew Herbarium.

A plant collected by Ernest Edward Galpin on Mount Kinangop in the southern Aberdare Range of Kenya, and also kept at Kew, was regarded different enough by the very young John Hutchinson, who named it Landtia lobulata in 1914.

Later, in 1930, Hutchinson and Marion Beatrice Moss described a plant collected by Arthur Disbrowe Cotton on Mount Kilimanjaro, since stored at Kew, naming it Landtia kilimanjarica.

In the Hagenia abyssinica-Hypericum revolutum-community it occurs with Alchemilla abyssinica, A. fischerii, Asparagus africanus, Crepis rueppellii, Cynoglossum caeruleum, Euphorbia schimperii, Hydrocotyle mannii, Kalanchoe petitiana and Satureja paradoxa in the herbaceous layer.