Description :

• Shrubs or small trees, occasionally somewhat scrambling
• Leaves opposite or occasionally in whorls of 3, petiolate; often with domatia in axils of nerves beneath; stipules connate at base, oblong or triangular, villous within, often ± persistent, ending in a linear or subulate, ± deciduous appendage
• Flowers axillary, solitary or in 2-10(-15)-flowered, sometimes umbel-like cymes; peduncles and pedicels mostly well developed; bracts and sometimes bracteoles present, small
• Calyx with tube ± subglobose; limb short, truncate or shortly toothed
• Corolla 5-lobed, white, cream, yellowish or greenish; lobes shorter than to longer than tube, acute to very distinctly long-apiculate or with a filiform appendage; tube cylindric, glabrous or hairy with a ring of deflexed hairs in middle
• Stamens 5, slightly to distinctly exserted; anthers often mucronate or slightly appendaged, often papillate; filaments very short
• Disc depressed, glabrous
• Ovary 2-5(6)-locular; ovules 1 per locule, pendulous, attached to upper part of septum; style usually exserted, slightly swollen at base; stigmatic knob coroniform, 2-5-lobed at apex
• Fruit a subglobose drupe, with (2-)4 or 5 pyrenes; pyrenes narrowly ± reniform or boat-shaped, often pitted
• x = 11 (1 report, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Rytigynia Blume
  • Blume: 178 (1850)
  • Robyns: 132 (1928)
  • Phillips: 731 (1951)
  • Verdcourt: 145 (1987)
  • Verdcourt & Bridson: 802 (1991)
  • Bridson: 284 (1998)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 70, tropical Africa
• Southern Africa : Species 2, Botswana and N KwaZulu-Natal