Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs or small trees, to 5 m tall.

Stems: Bark corky, ridged. Branchlets dark red, rust-colored pubescent when young, glabrescent, with pink lenticels and corky ridges when older.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades oblong, elliptic-oblong, or narrowly obovate-oblong, 2-11 × 1-4 cm. Apex subobtuse to rounded and sometimes abruptly shortly acuminate. Base narrowed and slightly oblique. Blade membranous to papery, abaxially pale brown when dry and glabrescent, adaxially gray and glabrous except for sparse pubescence along midvein. Margins entire, undulate. Pinnately veined, secondary veins 8-10 on each side of midvein, spreading, and inconspicuous on both surfaces, reticulate veins lax and inconspicuous. Petioles 2-4 mm, puberulent. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Inflorescences extra-axillary, leaf-opposed, or slightly below leaf, 1(or rarely 2)-flowered. Flowers perfect, 0.635 cm long. Pedicel 0.7-2.5 cm, puberulent; bracteole near base of pedicel, minute, apex acute. Sepals ovate-triangular, 2-2.5 mm, outside pubescent, inside glabrous. Petals pale yellow; outer petals oblong-lanceolate, shorter than inner petals, leathery, flat and spreading, outside slightly pubescent, inside glabrous, apex acute; inner petals oblong, erect and curved, ca. 10 mm, apex obtuse. Stamens many, ca. 1 mm; connectives apically convex. Ovary superior, carpels many, ca. 2 mm, pubescent; ovules 1 or 2 per carpel; styles widening into a thickly triangular bladelike glabrous stigma.

Fruit: Fruit in clusters of up to 18; red or purple or nearly black; almost spherical; ca. 5-7 mm in diam.; sparsely appressed pubescent or glabrescent; stipes 8-10 mm. Seeds 1 or 2 per monocarp; with a longitudinal circumferential band.

Ploidy: 2n = 18

Habitat:

Elevation Range: