Description:
Dioecious trees or shrubs with a simple indumentum. Leaves alternate, often long-petiolate, stipulate, simple, entire or toothed, penninerved; petioles bipulvinate; stipules minute and deciduous (or foliaceous and persistent elsewhere). Inflorescence s axillary (or cauliflorous elsewhere), solitary (or fasciculate elsewhere), racemose (or subspicate elsewhere); bracts usually 1-flowered; flowers shortly pedicellate. Male flowers : calyx (4)5-lobed, imbricate; petals absent; disc glands (4)5, alternating with the stamens, fleshy, contiguous; stamens (4)5(6), opposite the sepals; filaments free; anthers erect, dorsifixed, introrse, thecae parallel, longitudinally dehiscent; pistillode cylindric, not lobed. Female flowers : calyx as in the male; petals absent; disc hypogynous, cupular, entire; ovary (1)2(4)-locular, with 2 ovules per locule; styles short; stigmas bifid, recurved. Fruit subglobose or ellipsoid, subdrupaceous, tardily loculicidally dehiscent; pericarp thin; endocarp 1-locular by suppression. Seed s solitary by abortion, ellipsoid, ecarunculate; testa thin; albumen copious; cotyledons broad, flat, green.
Distribution:
Species +/- 20, all in W trop. Africa, except 1 in Uganda; sthn trop. Afr. 2 (but most probably further spp. in N Angola), Angola, Zambia.
Source:
SSTA
Classification:
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