Description :

• Small trees, shrubs, lianes with recurved woody tendrils (usually in subopposite pairs), or rarely shrublets
• Leaves petiolate, alternate, entire, crenate or toothed, sometimes with domatia in the nerve axils and with densely reticulate, tertiary venation; stipules pinnatifid or palmatifid, often caducous
• Flowers solitary, in pairs or in few-flowered cymes, axillary or occasionally terminal, often trimorphically heterostylous
• Sepals 5, usually unequal, persistent
• Petals 5, shortly clawed, usually yellow
• Stamens 5 + 5, all fertile, with filaments united into basal cup
• Ovary 4-10-locular, alternate ones sterile; styles 2-5, free or rarely partly united; stigmas capitate, grooved
• Fruit a drupe, with 3-5 or fewer seeds; not more than 1 per locule
• Seeds smooth, flattened, endospermic
• x = 6 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Hugonia L.
  • Linnaeus: 675 (1753)
  • Robson: 91 (1963)
  • Robson & Gonçalves: 4 (1969)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 35, mainly in Old World tropics
• Southern Africa : Species 1: Hugonia orientalis Engl., Mpumalanga (Lowveld)