Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs up to 2 m tall, glabrous except with sparse minute stellate hairs on young tips and corolla (under magnification), unarmed.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades elliptic to ovate–elliptic, ca. 12 cm long, 4.5 cm wide. Apex acute to acuminate. Base broadly cuneate to rounded, oblique. Surfaces dark green. Margins entire or rarely with a few shallow lobes or teeth. Petioles 2–3 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers 20–30 in racemose cymes sometimes forked from internodal position or leaf–opposed; Peduncle of first flower 2–3 cm long, floral rachis up to 10 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic. Calyx ca. 2 mm long, the lobes narrowly triangular. Corolla white, deeply divided, the lobes broadly lanceolate, ca. 5 mm long, minutely pubescent externally. Stamens inserted near base of corolla tube; filaments ca. 2 mm long; anthers yellow, oblong, ca. 2 mm long, opening by apical pores. Ovary superior, globose, glabrous; style 1, erect, ca. 4 mm long, just exceeding anthers; stigma green, capitate.

Fruit: Berries 1–6 in clusters; bright shiny red; succulent; globose; pendent; ca. 1 cm or more in diameter; fruiting pedicels slightly swollen upward; calyx scarcely enlarged. Seeds numerous; pale buff; flattened; suborbicular; ca. 2 mm in diameter.

Ploidy: 2n = 24

Habitat:

Elevation Range: