Description :

• Small trees, shrubs, woody climbers or lianas, often reaching top of supporting tree, mostly fixed to substrate by adventitious, axillary roots from stems; often with scattered stinging hairs; plants dioecious or rarely monoecious
• Leaves alternate, entire to ± lobed, often palmately nerved, petiolate, with dot-like or sometimes also ± elongated cystoliths; stipules intrapetiolar, free or ± connate
• Inflorescences dichotomous or irregularly branched panicles, axillary or on older nodes; bracts small or 0
• Flowers unisexual
• Male flowers : tepals 4 or 5, ovate, slightly imbricate; stamens 4 or 5; ovary rudimentary
• Female flowers : tepals 4, unequal, ± free or connate; staminodes 0; ovary straight or oblique, ovoid; stigma subsessile, penicillate-capitate or rarely sublanceolate, persistent
• Achene straight or oblique, either enclosed by the fleshy, enlarged tepals or berry-like and stipitate
• Seed with a thin coat
• x = 8, 13 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Urera Gaudich.
  • Gaudichaud-Beaupré: 496 (1830)
  • Weddell: 143, t. 2A (1856)
  • Weddell: 88 (1869)
  • Bentham: 383 (1880)
  • Engler: 105 (1888)
  • Rendle: 263 (1917)
  • Friis: 547 (1986)
  • Friis et al.: 125 (1987)
  • Friis: 5 (1989)
  • Friis: 80 (1991)
  • Friis: 621 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 40, widespread in tropical Africa, Madagascar, tropical America and the Pacific Islands
• Southern Africa : Species 1: Urera trinervis (Hochst.) Friis & Immelman, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape