Description :

• Trees or shrubs, evergreen or deciduous, dioecious or rarely polygamous, often armed with spines; branches lenticellate
• Leaves alternate or sometimes fascicled, petiolate; blade 3-5-veined at or near base, margins entire, crenate or serrate; stipules 0
• Male flowers pedicellate, in fascicles of 2-10, or 5-10 flowers in groups of 3; pedicels surrounded at base by small hairy scales; calyx 2-6-lobed; corolla 0; stamens 10-many; filaments surrounded at base by sparsely to densely hairy nectaries which form a honeycomb structure; anthers bilocular, dehiscing by means of longitudinal slits
• Female flowers pedicellate, axillary, solitary or in fascicles of 2 or 3; pedicels surrounded at base by small hairy scale-like bracts; calyx deeply 3-7-lobed; lobes sometimes revolute and sometimes fringed with stipitate glands; corolla 0; disc annular, lobed, glutinous, hairy, sparsely hairy or glabrous; ovary unilocular or sometimes incompletely 2- or 3-locular; placentas 2-7, parietal, each placenta with 1 or 2 ovules; styles channelled, as many as placentas
• Fruit a subglobose to oblong berry, minutely papillose, glabrous or hairy
• Seeds embedded in fleshy pulp, elliptic to broadly elliptic, glabrous to densely woolly; testa leathery; embryo straight; cotyledons flat, elliptic, sometimes thin and pinnately veined; endosperm present
• x = 10

Nomenclature:

• Dovyalis E.Mey. ex Arn.
  • Arnott: 251 (1841)
  • Harvey: 69 (1860)
  • Sleumer: 64 (1972)
  • Langenegger: 84 (1976)
• Aberia Hochst.
  • Hochstetter: 2 (1844)
  • Sonder: 9 (1850)
  • Harvey: 70 (1860)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 20, widespread in Africa and extending to Sri Lanka and New Guinea
• Southern Africa : Species 6 recognised, Northern Province, North-West, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape