Mimetes, the pagoda, is a genus of evergreen shrubs or small trees 0.5–6 m (1.6–19.7 ft) high, with thirteen species assigned to the family Proteaceae.
The thirteen species currently assigned to the genus Mimetes are evergreen, low shrubs to small trees of ½–6 m (1⅔–20 ft) high.
Flower heads of the brush-type have large perianths, pollen presenters and often bracts in bright and contrasting yellow, white or red.
The bright yellow bracteoles of the three flowers together form a long, straight and narrow tube, from which only the perianth limbs and pollen presenters extend.
The lower part, where the lobes remain merged when the flower has opened (called tube), is mostly becoming hairless, very short, circular to somewhat square in cross section or inflated.
In the upper part (or limbs), which enclosed the pollen presenter in the bud, the four lobes are line-shaped, pointy or pointed, continue to be softly hairy or becoming hairless.
From the perianth emerges a style that is circular in cross section, curved when breaking open the bud, but eventually straight.
The ovary is slender, softly hairy and contains one pendulous ovule, it is difficult to determine where it merges into the style.
[1] In 1807, Richard Anthony Salisbury in his contribution to William Hooker's book The Paradisus Londinensis, divided Leucadendron, as defined by Carl Linnaeus and that contained rather divers forms, over several new genera and erected, amongst others, the genus Mimetes.
[1] Two years later Salisbury assigned five species to Mimetes in a book by Joseph Knight titled On the cultivation of the plants belonging to the natural order of Proteeae, M. fimbriifolius, M. splendidus, M. argenteus, M. hirtus and M. palustris.
Phillips and John Hutchinson disagreed with Brown and Meissner, and in 1912 returned to Salisbury's delimitation, restoring both Diastella and Orothamnus.
It shows that Mimetes belongs to a group that further only consists of genera endemic to the Cape Floristic Region, that together constitute the subtribe Leucadendrinae.
[1] The species are called pagoda for their tiered compound inflorescences in English, and stompie (small stump) probably for the charcoaled remains sticking out of the ground after a fire in Afrikaans.
Intermediate in most characters, the general habitat is mostly like that of M. cucullatus, but the lowest part of the stems is stout, and the bark is thick and cartilaginous like that of M. fimbriifolius.
[7] The herbarium specimen collected by Francis Masson, which was described by Salisbury in 1809 and named Mimetes floccosa, could not be traced, and its description is so general that it could apply to several other species.
[1] The genus Mimetes has a distribution not unlike other endemic genera in the Cape Floristic Region, with the highest species concentration in the wet mountains in the southwest, centered around the Kogelberg Nature Reserve.
Mimetes splendidus is a rare species that nevertheless has a relatively large distribution, in the coastal mountains that parallel the south coast between the Clock Peaks near Swellendam in the west and Rondebos near Storms River in the east.