Monadenium guentheri is a stout perennial succulent herb with long, cylindrical stems, with prominent spine-tipped tubercles and fleshy sickle-shaped deciduous leaves. Flowers small with a red rim-like gland and enclosed in two fused greenish-white bracts with lovely purple mottling. At yet very few species of this Genus are to be found in collections but this one is one of the older species described during the early part of the twentieth-century.Root: It has a fleshy, thick, rootstock that can be profitably raised.Stems: Many, unbranched, fleshy, cylindric, spiny, erect to 15-60 cm tall or decumbent to 90 cm long, to 2 cm in diameter, tessellated with prominent slightly recurved conical tubercles to 7 x 7 mm from which the leaves arise. Each tubercles with 1-3 small prickles clustered at apex around the base of the leaf or leaf-scar, stout, to 2 mm long, with the middle spine deflexed, and the lateral smaller, glabrous.Leaves: Obovate, to 7-80 mm long, 3-18 mm wide, broad, linear-lanceolate, acute, entire, fleshy, with margins more-or-less crisped, deciduous, glabrous.
