Description:

• Shrubs, unarmed or branches becoming spine-tipped; branches sometimes subsucculent, leafless, scurfy
• Leaves simple, solitary, alternate or fascicled, glabrous to farinose, with margins usually entire, sometimes rudimentary or undeveloped
• Flowers solitary or fascicled in leaf axils or in terminal, leafless corymbs
• Sepals 4, subequal or unequal in 2 series, upper and lower valvate and enclosing lateral sepals
• Petals 0
• Stamens usually 5-8(-13); androphore with basal, variously shaped, conspicuous nectary
• Ovary on an elongated gynophore at least 4 mm long; cylindrical, 1-locular with many ovules attached on 2(-4) placentas; stigma capitate, sessile
• Fruit indehiscent or tardily dehiscent, long-cylindrical
• Seeds reniform; testa ridged or smooth, often embedded in scarlet matrix
• x = 8, 9 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Cadaba Forssk.
  • Forsskål: 67 (1775)
  • Sonder: 59 (1860)
  • Pax: 209 (1891)
  • Gilg & Gilg-Benedict: 222 (1915)
  • Phillips: 356 (1951)
  • Roessler: 4 (1966)
  • Marsh: 171 (1970)
  • Fici: 46 (1993)
• Schepperia Neck.
  • Necker: 67 (1790)
  • Sonder: 59 (1860)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 30, Old World tropics including Arabian Peninsula, India, Australia, Madagascar and islands of the Indian Ocean
• Southern Africa: Species 4, widespread