Description :

• Trees or shrubs, sometimes scandent, without spines, glabrous, often with conspicuous orange pigments in exposed bark; branches brownish grey, terete; branchlets angular
• Leaves alternate, entire, coriaceous, petiolate; stipules free, small, thick, deciduous
• Inflorescence a pedunculate or rarely sessile, few- or many-flowered dichasium, in axils of foliage leaves or rarely in axil of bracts forming pseudopanicles; bracts persistent
• Flowers bisexual, pedicellate
• Sepals 5, membranous, unequal, imbricate, ± connate, with margin entire to laciniate
• Petals 5, elliptic, imbricate in bud, spreading, white or greenish white to cream or pale yellow, often brownish-flecked
• Disc fleshy, scarcely 5-lobed or crenulate and half enveloping ovary
• Stamens 5, with ± flattened filaments, connate to base of disc; anthers versatile, introrse
• Ovary superior, sessile, almost free or up to half immersed in disc, (2)3-locular, with 2 erect ovules per locule; style short, cylindric, terete; stigma (2)3-branched
• Fruit a dry, woody, dehiscent capsule, often waxy or fleshy, with abrupt horn- or wing-like emergences which may be variously divided
• Seeds 1-3, glossy, red-brown, almost completely covered by a thin yellow aril, with fleshy endosperm

Nomenclature:

• Pterocelastrus Meisn.
  • Pterocelastrus Meisn. to be conserved against Asterocarpus Eckl. & Zeyh.
  • Meisner: 68 (1837)
  • Walpers: 535 (1842)
  • Sonder: 461 (1860)
  • Brown: 16 (1906)
  • Davison: 321 (1927)
  • Burtt Davy: 447 (1932)
  • Loesener: 156 (1942)
  • Robson: 374 (1966)
• Celastrus L. in part
  • Candolle: 5 (1825).
• Asterocarpus Eckl. & Zeyh.
  • Ecklon & Zeyher: 122 (1834/1835)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 3, southeastern Africa, occurring as far north as Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi
• Southern Africa : Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape