Description:

• Shrubs or small trees, evergreen, usually halophytic, rarely dioecious
• Leaves reduced to amplexicaul, vaginate scales, sessile, alternate, punctate with sunken, salt-secreting glands; stipules 0
• Inflorescence a simple, many-flowered, catkin-like raceme on old and/or on young wood; bracts ± resembling leaves, 1 per flower
• Flowers bisexual or rarely unisexual, regular, shortly pedicelled, very small and very many
• Sepals 5, free, spreading
• Petals 5, free, longer than sepals, white, pink or red
• Disc saucer- to cup-shaped, often fleshy, dark-coloured with margin variously lobed
• Stamens 4-10, fused basally with the disc; filaments free, thin; anthers 2-locular, versatile, with longitudinal slits, apiculate or obtuse; in female flowers changed to staminodes
• Ovary superior, 1-locular, flask-shaped, with 3(4 or 5) basal-parietal placentas bearing several to many erect, anatropous ovules; styles 3, short, incurved
• Fruit a usually 3-valved capsule
• Seeds several to many, narrowly ovoid with an apical tuft of hairs and a plumose awn; endosperm 0
• x = 12 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Tamarix L.
  • Linnaeus: 270 (1753)
  • Harvey: 119 (1860)
  • Podlech: 1 (1968)
  • Obermeyer: 36 (1976)
  • Baum: 19 (1978)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 50, mainly around the Mediterranean basin, westwards to England and the Canary Isles, eastwards as far as China
• Southern Africa: 1 isolated species: Tamarix usneoides E.Mey. ex Bunge, in southwestern and southern Africa
  • Two species commonly cultivated: *T. gallica L., the French Tamarisk, and *T. ramosissima Ledeb