Description :

• Evergreen trees or shrubs; plants usually dioecious or polygamous
• Leaves alternate, rarely crowded at tips of branchlets, penninerved, rarely subtriplinerved; membranous or coriaceous, glabrous, usually with pits on underside in axils of lowest 1 or 2 pairs of nerves
• Inflorescences thyrso-paniculate to (pleio-)botryoid, axillary or subterminal
• Flowers bisexual, 3-merous, small
• Perianth with or without a tube
• Tepals 6 or 8, equal, usually deciduous
• Bisexual flowers with stamens in 3 or 4 whorls, outer 3 fertile, inner, if present, reduced to staminodes; filaments very short or lacking, those of innermost whorl with a pair of large, sessile glands at base, longer than anthers to 0; anthers 4-thecous, introrse in 2 outer whorls, ± extrorse in third whorl; ovary ovoid, ellipsoid or subglobose, usually glabrous; style longer or shorter than ovary; stigma sometimes 2-lobed
• Male flowers similar but ovary sterile, stalk-like or lacking
• Female flowers as in bisexual flowers but stamens rudimentary, barren
• Fruit baccate, ellipsoid or globose, seated on or in an enlarged, cupular receptacle which is either truncate or 6-toothed or 6-lobed from persistent tepals
• x = 12 (11)

Nomenclature:

• Ocotea Aubl.
  • Aublet: 780, t. 310 (1775)
  • Jussieu: 80 (1789)
  • Nees: 25, 354 (1836)
  • Endlicher: 321 (1837)
  • Baillon: 476 (1870)
  • Bentham: 157 (1880)
  • Stapf: 186 (1909)
  • Stapf: 498 (1912)
  • Kostermans: 73 (1938)
  • Rohwer: 3 (1986)
  • Van der Werff: 385 (1991)
  • Rohwer: 382 (1993)
  • Verdcourt: 9 (1996)
  • Diniz: 56 (1997)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 300, mostly in tropical and subtropical America, ± 30 in Madagascar, 7 in Africa, and 1 in the Canary Islands
• Southern Africa : Species 2, Northern Province, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape
  • Ocotea bullata (Burch.) E.Mey. is Cape Stinkwood