Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrub to 3 m tall.

Stems: Stems usually unbranched, pithy, hollow.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Usually in whorls of 3-5 per node. Blades oblong-oblanceolate, 13-30 cm x 2.5-6 cm. Apex tapering. Base tapering. Surfaces glabrous. Margins entire. Subsessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescence axillary and terminal, paniculate, +/- bracteolate. Flowers bisexual (perfect), fertile, night-blooming, fragrant. Calyx broadly bell-shaped, ca 0.5" long, 5-parted nearly to base, enlarging, fleshy and red-purple in fruit. Corolla nearly actinomorphic or slightly irregular, salver-shaped, white to yellowish, tube to 5.5" long, curved, limb 5-lobed, reflexed, ca. 1" diam.; nectary disk often present at base of ovary, annular or developed on anterior side only. Stamens 4(5), in 2 pairs, purple, 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; placentation basal-axile; ovules 1 per ovary lobe, anatropous to hemitropous of apotropous; style 1, purple, usually cleft, arising between lobes, long-projecting; stigmas 2, sometimes 1 reduced and vestigial.

Fruit: Fruit drupaceous; globose or obovoid; purplish; separating into 4 stones; subtended or enclosed by the persistent calyx; exocarp ± fleshy; endocarp bony or crustaceous. Seeds one per fruit; oblong; with endosperm absent or scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Cultivated.

Elevation Range: