Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrub or treelet to 7.5 m tall.

Stems: Stems with whitish warts (lenticels).

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite or whorled. Leaves elliptic-ovate. Surfaces glossy, glabrous. Margins entire. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers usually in small, compact, axillary cymes, forming verticillate arrangements at each node, together often forming a thyrse, sometimes cymes reduced to solitary flowers, thus essentially arranged in racemose inflorescences, each flower +/- bracteolate; <0.5" long. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or sometimes unisexual (and then plants gynodioecious or rarely dioecious); fragrant. Calyx bell-shaped, 5-toothed, glandular outside. Corolla nearly actinomorphic or slightly irregular, funnel-shaped, white or tinged with pink, tube ca. 0.33" long, limb 0.4" diam, slightly to greatly exceeding the calyx, 5-lobed, the lobes subequal; nectary disk often present at base of ovary, annular or developed on anterior side only. Stamens 4(5), in 2 pairs, inserted on corolla tube and usually long–exserted, aligned with the sinuses; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, occasionally 1 theca reduced or absent or the 2 thecae confluent, occasionally the connective elongate and thus separating the thecae. Ovary superior, rarely on a gynophore, 4-celled; ovules 1 per cell, attached laterally; style arising between lobes, projecting, placentation basal-axile; ovules 1 per ovary lobe, anatropous to hemitropous of apotropous; style 1, usually cleft; stigmas 2, sometimes 1 reduced and vestigial.

Fruit: Fruit drupaceous; globose or obovoid; weakly 4-lobed; separating at maturity into 4 pyrenes or sometimes cohering in pairs; subtended or enclosed by the persistent calyx; exocarp ± fleshy; endocarp bony or crustaceous; cream-colored or yellowish when ripe containing 1 or 2 stones. Seeds one per fruit; oblong; with endosperm absent or scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: