Description :

• Shrubs or small trees, or sometimes scandent, rarely arborescent
• Leaves entire or crenate
• Flowers small, often unisexual, borne in axillary racemes or umbels or in terminal or lateral panicles
• Calyx with sepals sometimes almost free or connate, imbricate, usually marked with resiniferous dots
• Corolla with petals free, or shortly connate, elliptic, obovate or oblong, spreading or reflexed, sometimes glandular, inner surface and sometimes outer margins densely papillose
• Stamens free, shorter or longer than corolla, variously attached to petals; filaments linear; anthers ovate, dehiscing by slits or very rarely by pores
• Ovary superior, subglobose or ovoid, often pilose; style long or short; ovule single; stigma discoid, entire or very rarely lobed; young capsule sometimes thin-walled
• Fruit a globose, 1-seeded drupe, up to ± 14 mm in diameter; pericarp fleshy; endocarp woody

Nomenclature:

• Embelia Burm.f.
  • Burman: 62 (1768)
  • Mez: 295 (1902)
  • Harvey & Wright: 433 (1906)
  • Phillips: 563 (1951)
  • Dyer: 3 (1963)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 130, through Asia, Australia, Mascarene Islands, as well as tropical Africa
• Southern Africa : Species 2: Embelia ruminata (E.Mey. ex A.DC.) Mez, Namibia, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape
  • A specimen from the Caprivi (Namibia) has been referred to by Dyer: 5 (1963) as E. sp ., by Kupicha: 198 (1983) as E. schimperi Vatke and by Halliday: 14 (1984) as E. xylocarpa P.Halliday