Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Low shrub 1–2 m. high, or prostrate, or a medium-sized tree up to 5–6 m. high, glabrous or essentially so except in the inflorescence and on very young growth, where strigose.

Stems: Bark of the branchlets reddish–brown, smooth except for the very numerous and conspicuous pale lenticels.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades elliptic to obovate or suborbicular. up to about 8 cm. long and 6 cm. wide, (1–) 1.5–2 times as long as wide. Apex rounded or emarginate or when blade elliptic, apex obtuse. Base cuneate to acute or rounded. Upper surfaces dark green and lustrous; lower surfaces dull; blades usually with a depressed elliptic glandular area about 0.5 mm. long on each side of the midrib at extreme base. Margins entire. Small veins prominently reticulate on both sides of the blade, the primary lateral veins mostly 4–6 pairs, straight at base but curving and anastomosing before reaching the margins. Petioles stout 2–4 mm. long.

Flowers: Flowers in short–peduncled axillary cymes shorter than the leaves (mostly 2–4 cm. long, with 8–20 flowers), the cyme–branches often strongly flattened and 1–1.5 mm. wide, often glabrescent near the base, the tips densely pale–strigose like the hypanthium, the flowers and the tips of the cyme–branches appearing silvery white to the unaided eye; cymes usually naked in anthesis, the ovate, acute, finely glandular-ciliate bracts 1.5–2 mm. long but very soon deciduous. Flowers bisexual (perfect); perianth and androecium perigynous; hypanthium free, well developed, densely hairy on both surfaces. Hypanthium campanulate or turbinate, at anthesis about 3 mm. long and wide, the inner surface hairy. Calyx lobes triangular–ovate, acute or blunt– tipped, heavily pubescent, the margins glandular–ciliate but otherwise entire. Corolla of 5 petals, glabrous, oblanceolate or spatulate, 3–5 mm. long, 2–3 times as long as wide, the tips rounded, often erose, the bases cuneate. Stamens about 20 (up to 30, according to Hooker) in one series, the filaments pale (?white), about 5 mm. long or less, hirsute on the inner surface except on the distal third, the flattened bases coherent a third or half the length of the filaments into a cylinder; anthers about 0.5 mm. long, (?)pink or (?)purplish. Ovary superior, long–hirsute, sessile at the bottom of the tube; style 6–7 mm. long, filiform, hirsute except at tip, erect; stigma minute, terminal.

Fruit: Fruit globose or oval; 2–5 cm. long; white to pink or purple; edible; with white juicy insipid flesh; the stone 1–2 cm. long with 5–6 acute longitudinal ribs. Seeds 1 per fruit.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Dry broadleaf evergreen formation – shrublands/dwarf shrublands near in coastal areas as well as in dunes and around fresh water and saline wetlands.

Elevation Range: