Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Large shrubs or small trees up to 10 m tall.

Stems: Trunk relatively thick with contorted surface, wood pale greenish, soft, sappy, bark gray or brownish, smooth, easily damaged.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades broadly lanceolate to ovate, elliptic, or ovate–peltate. Apex rounded to acuminate. Base cuneate to cordate. Surfaces glabrous or densely pubescent with minute simple hairs, thick to coriaceous. Margins entire or undulate. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in solitary or in fascicles from stem pulvini or short woody spurs. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic, pedicellate. Calyx tubular–campanulate, 4-lobed, ± split deeply on 1 side. Corolla greenish yellow, 4-lobed, connate ca. ½ its length, the lobes ovate, valvate, silky pubescent. Stamens 4, sessile, inserted below corolla throat; filaments extremely short to absent; anthers linear, acute, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2-celled, globose to ovoid, placentation axile; ovules numerous; style 1, short; stigma 2-lobed.

Fruit: Berries fleshy; whitish; yellow to orange; globose; elongate to fusiform. Seeds irregular; seed coat pitted; embryo curved; endosperm present.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: