Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Evergreen shrubs, 1–5 m tall.

Stems: Young branches flattened with white, fine lenticels, glabrous becoming terete (cylindrical) with maturity.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite on mature branches and alternate on juvenile branches. Blades elliptic or narrowly elliptic, 4–7 × 2–4 cm. Apex obtusely shortly acuminate. Base narrowly attenuate, slightly decurrent. Blades leathery. Margins obtusely serrate. Veins pinnate, secondary veins reticulate. Petioles 3–8 mm. Stipules c. 2 mm. long, triangular-acicular.

Flowers: Flowers in axillary cymes single, small, 1.5–2 × as wide; peduncle 5–10 mm, 2–4–branched, branches short, less than 3 mm; pedicel 1–3 mm, up to 5 mm in fruit. Flowers bisexual (perfect), 3–5 mm in diameter. Calyx of 5 sepals, triangular–ovate, ca. 1 mm. Corolla of 5 petals, white, narrowly ovate or narrowly oblong. Stamens 5; filamentous, shorter than corolla. Disk thin, cupuliform, weakly 5-lobed, intrastaminal; anthers longitudinally dehiscent, introrse. Ovary superior, free, surrounded by disk, 3-locular; ovules erect, 2 per locule; stigma 3-lobed.

Fruit: Capsules orange–red; cylindric; ca. 8 × 3–4 mm; dehiscing from above; loculicidally in 3 valves; usually only 1 seed maturing per valve. Seeds black–brown; narrowly ovoid; 3–4 mm; with membranous basal wing.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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