The shrubs mostly have a single stem at their base, but some species sprout from an underground rootstock, from which the plant can regrow after fire has killed the above ground biomass.

Leucospermum species mostly have seated, simple, mostly leathery, often softly hairy leaves, set in a spiral, with entire margins or more often, with 3–17 blunt teeth with thickened, bony tips, and without stipules at their foot.

Usually the four anthers are merged individually with the tip the perianth lobes, and only in a few species, a very short filament is present that further down cannot be distinguished from the tepals anymore.

Dried specimens of L. pedunculatum and L. prostratum can be difficult to distinguish, but although both are prostrate species, the growth habits in the field differ considerably.

The leaves are alternately set along the stem, distanced and slightly pointing towards the tip of the branch or overlapping, mostly without, sometimes with a leaf stalk but always without stipules at their base, 1.5–14 cm (0.59–5.51 in) long and linear, elliptic, oblanceolate, oval, inverted egg-shaped or spade-shaped, the edge entire or with up to 17 teeth towards the tip, hairless or with a covering of soft cringy one-celled hairs, sometime interspersed with longer straight silky hairs.

In the majority of the species the involucral bracts have tough rubbery consistency and are usually softly hairy, overlapping and tightly pressed against the flower head.

[2] The sixteen Leucospermum species that have been analysed are all diploids having twelve sets of homologue chromosomes (2n=24),[2] which is consistent with the rest of the subtribe Proteinae.

The style breaks out of the bud at the side facing the rim of the head, and the perianth lobes may stick together with four or three forming a sheath, or roll back individually.

L. mundii is an upright shrub with two distinct populations, one with leaves 10 – 85 mm wide that have 7 - 17 teeth at their tip, flowers pale yellow aging to orange.

L. hamatum has linear leaves mostly with three teeth near the tip, a poorly developed or absent involucre, but four or five very large bracts forming a pseudo-involucre subtending the four to seven flowers per head.

Among it are both upright, spreading and creeping shrubs, and leaf-shapes vary from line- to egg- and wedge-shaped, but they all have felty hairy leaves, even when aged.

[5] The earliest known description from a species we now include in the genus Leucospermum was by Paul Hermann in Paradisus Batavus, a book describing the plants of the Hortus Botanicus Leiden (botanical garden of the Leyden University), that was published in 1689, three years after his death.

He called it Salix conophora Africana (African cone-bearing willow), based on his observation of Leucospermum conocarpodendron on the lower slopes of the Table Mountain.

Joseph Knight published a book in 1809 titled On the cultivation of the plants belonging to the natural order of Proteeae, that contained an extensive revision of the Proteaceae attributed to Salisbury.

Carl Meissner, who contributed a section on the Proteaceae in 1856 to the series Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis by Alphonse Pyramus de Candolle, recognised twenty-three species, including seven new ones: L. gueinzii, L. mundii, L. reflexum, L. oleaefolium var.

Otto Kuntze revised the genus in 1891 and called it Leucadendron, a homonym of a name that had already been used by Linnaeus in 1753 for another group of Proteaceae, which have separate sexes and very large bracts.

Edwin Percy Phillips newly described L. glabrum and L. muirii in 1910, Spencer Le Marchant Moore portrayed L. saxosum in 1911, while Otto Stapf added L. gerrardii in 1912.

John Patrick Rourke in 1970 distinguished 47 species, eight of which new to science: L. erubescens, L. fulgens, L. innovans, L. pluridens, L. praecox, L. profugum, L. secundifolium and L.

[2] Pincushions can only be found in a narrow zone from the southwestern Cape, along the Great Escarpment to eastern Transvaal and Eswatini, and two isolated areas, one in the Chimanimani Mountain range on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border, and the other in Namaqualand.

A remarkable concentration of 30% of the species occurs in a narrow strip of about 200 km (120 mi) long on the south coast between Hermanus and Witsand.

On the other hand, L. patersonii and L. truncatum are specialists that only can be found on a ridge of limestone of the Alexandria Formation, parallel to the southern coast between Stilbaai and Danger Point.

The pollen is brushed on the heads and bodies of the birds, mammals and large insects that try to reach the copious and thick nectar that fills the perianth tube.

In older flower heads of Leucospermum most of the pollen will have been transferred to the bodies of earlier pollinators, and a small groove at the very tip of the style opens.

Red-winged starling Onychognathus morio and Cape weaver Ploceus capensis are occasional visitors that damage the perianth tube to extract the nectar, and are probably much less effective pollinators.

Hairy-footed gerbils Gerbillurus paeba, and striped field mice Rhabdomys pumilio were observed to visit the flowers of L. arenarium, and both carried its pollen on forehead and breast.

The fruits consist partly of a whitish, fleshy or gelatinous pericarp, a so-called elaiosome, that attracts ants because they contain chemicals that mimic pheromones.

A large majority of Leucospermum species is killed by fire because these have a single stem that only branches higher up, and are covered by a rather thin bark.

A number of large species (L. conocarpodendron, L. heterophyllum, L. patersonii, L. pedunculatum, L. profugum and L. royenifolium) have thick bark, which allows them to survive fires if these are not too intense, and so stretch their lifespan regularly beyond the interval between successive incidents.

This mechanism is best developed in the species of the section Crassicaudex (L. cuneiforme, L. gerrardii, L. innovans and L. saxosum) that mostly occur outside the fynbos, in areas with dominant summer rainfall where fires may be more frequent, but is also present in L. hypophyllocarpodendron, L. prostratum and L. tomentosum.

conocarpodendron, L. cordatum, L. formosum, L. glabrum, L. grandiflorum, L. gueinzii, L. hamatum, L. heterophyllum, L. innovans, L. muirii, L. parile, L. profugum, L. saxatile and L. saxosum.