Description :

• Herbs, soft-wooded shrubs, subshrubs, or rarely small trees, erect or reclining, sometimes scrambling, glabrous or pubescent; stems often hollow, thickened at nodes and occasionally producing adventitious roots; a single prophyll present at shoot apex, sometimes hidden by sheathing petiole, or rarely 0
• Leaves alternate, entire, symmetrical or asymmetrical, occasionally peltate, sometimes lobed at base, membranous or coriaceous, glabrous or often glandular or ciliate; clear or variously coloured pellucid glands often present, venation penninerved, palmate or pinnate; petiolate, sometimes sheathing stem, sometimes with a stipule-like structure at base
• Inflorescences leaf-opposed, solitary, pedunculate, ascending-arching, distally drooping spikes
• Flowers bisexual or female, either both on one spike or on separate spikes, sessile or pedicellate, widely spaced or crowded together on an often fleshy rachis; floral bracts round, triangular, semilunar or calceiform, sometimes with elongated bases, glabrous or ciliate, pedicellate
• Stamens 2; anthers basifixed with thecae usually distinct
• Ovary sessile; styles long, short or 0; stigmas 2
• Fruit dry or fleshy, often immersed in a succulent rachis, with minute beak, green, red-brown or black, glabrous to densely puberulous, occasionally glandular
• x = 13 (10, 12, 14, 39) (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Piper L.
  • Linnaeus: 28 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 18 (1754)
  • Kunth: 561 (1839)
  • Endlicher: 16 (1847)
  • Candolle: 240 (1869)
  • Bentham: 129 (1880)
  • Engler: 6 (1888)
  • Baker & Wright: 146 (1909)
  • Wright: 488 (1912)
  • Balle: 369 (1942)
  • Yuncker: 1 (1958)
  • Täckholm & Drar: 361 (1969)
  • Killick: t. 1583 (1970)
  • Airy Shaw: 995 (1973)
  • Tebbs: 518 (1993)
  • Verdcourt: 1 (1996)
  • Diniz: 70 (1996)
  • Diniz: 25 (1997)
• Lepianthes Raf.
  • Rafinesque: 84 (1838)
• Pothomorphe Miq.
  • Miquel: 450 (1839)
  • Miquel: 36 (1840)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 1 000, cosmopolitan in warmer regions of both hemispheres, only 3 species in Africa; often pioneers of disturbed areas such as wood or track edges and landslides
• Southern Africa : Species 1: Piper capense L.f., Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape