Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small trees 1–5 m tall, often covered with firm unicellular hairs with a basal cystolith.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate but appearing whorled, fleshy. Blades oblanceolate to obovate, 10–20 cm long, 3.5–9 cm wide. Apex obtuse. Base attenuate. Surfaces densely silky pubescent. Margins usually entire. Sessile to petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in stiff, paniculate, scorpioid cymes that uncoil progressively as the flowers open, cymes usually 6–8 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect), small, sessile. Calyx lobes oblong to orbicular, ca. 1.5 mm long, densely silky strigose. Corolla tubular, without scales in the throat, white, ca. 2.5–3.3 mm long, the tube short, 1.5–2 mm long, the lobes elliptic. Stamens slightly exserted; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 4-celled; ovules usually 4, 2 per carpel, eventually 1 per cell, sometimes fewer by abortion, anatropous, erect, ascending, or nearly horizontal, rarely pendulous; style 1, terminal, gynobasic arising from between the essentially distinct ovary lobes, with an annulus just below the stigma; stigma 2-lobed.

Fruit: Fruit white; drupaceous; fleshy; globose; ca. 4 mm in diameter; glabrous; sometimes with corky endocarp; an adaptation for floating. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Naturalized and relatively common in coastal areas.

Elevation Range: