Description :

• Glabrous evergreen shrubs, often spreading or straggling, or woody climbers, spinescent, with long shoots and brachyblasts
• Spines straight or backward-pointing, axillary, occasionally leafy and floriferous, with only one node
• Branches angular or terete and reddish brown when young, becoming terete and grey with age, lenticellate, smooth or verrucose
• Leaves alternate or fasciculate, subsessile, glabrous; stipules free, small, subulate, marcescent
• Inflorescences lax to dense, few to many-flowered dichasia or monochasia, in axils of leaves or in clusters on brachyblasts
• Flowers bisexual, hypogynous, pedicellate
• Sepals 5, subequal, imbricate, free or united at base, margin ciliolate
• Petals 5, imbricate in bud, spreading or suberect, cream or white
• Disc intrastaminal, single, convex, shallowly 5-crenate
• Stamens 5, free, subterete; filaments slender, arising at base of disc; anthers basifixed, slightly versatile, latrorse
• Ovary sessile, a quarter to half immersed in and adnate to disc, 3-locular; ovules (4-)6(-12) per locule; placentation axile with ovules arranged in 2 rows; style short, cylindric; stigma 3-lobed
• Fruit a dry capsule, dehiscing loculicidally to base; capsules cream to pink or red, obconic-trigonous, smooth
• Seeds 6-18, glossy, reddish brown, with fleshy endosperm, completely enveloped by a well-developed, fleshy, orange aril

Nomenclature:

• Putterlickia Endl.
  • Endlicher: 1086 (1840)
  • Davison: 336 (1927)
  • Robson: 5 (1965)
  • Jordaan & Van Wyk: 322 (1998)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 4, confined to southern Mozambique and southern Africa
• Southern Africa : Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern, Western and Eastern Cape