Description :

• Trees or shrubs, with 4-angled branchlets
• Leaves opposite, petiolate, simple, entire, obovate, elliptic or lanceolate, often acuminate, glabrous, often smelling of almonds when crushed (a cyanogenic glycoside); stipules rudimentary
• Flowers bisexual, regular, small, in short, axillary, trichotomous cymes, arranged in lax racemes, shorter than subtending leaf; bracts opposite, up to length of flowers, often deciduous
• Calyx 4- or 5-lobed on rim of tube/hypanthium, conspicuous, often considered to be petals, obovate- or linear-spathulate, white or pinkish, usually pubescent at base; tube/hypanthium adnate to ovary and slightly exceeding it
• Petals (4)5, arising in throat of calyx tube, minute, scale-like (perhaps not representing petals), alternating with, and much shorter than sepals, incurved and closing tube in bud, spreading and reflexed at anthesis exposing stamens, valvate, usually pink, pubescent
• Stamens (4)5, arising in calyx tube below petals; filaments very short; anthers small, didymous, 2-thecous, opening by longitudinal slits
• Ovary inferior, of (3)4 or 5 fused carpels, 3-5-locular, with ± 3 pendulous, superposed, hemitropous, bitegmic ovules on axile placentas in each locule; style straight; stigma thickened
• Fruit a false drupe, thinly fleshy, globose, about the size of a pea, red to reddish brown, marked by a circular scar left by deciduous hypanthium; with 1 seed per locule
• Seeds somewhat obovoid, with thick, brown, warty testa; cotyledon spiral or irregularly folded; endosperm 0
• x = 10 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Olinia Thunb.
  • Thunberg: 4 (1800)
  • Sonder: 519 (1862)
  • Hofmeyer & Phillips: 97 (1922)
  • Burtt Davy: 47, 200 (1926)
  • Sebola & Balkwill: 97 (1999)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 8-10, Africa
• Southern Africa : Species 5, in forest and forest margins, Northern and North-West, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape