Description:

• Glabrous evergreen trees or shrubs (mangroves)
• Leaves opposite, oblong to elliptic, leathery, lower surface often with small black dots
• Flowers axillary, usually solitary, ebracteate
• Calyx 8-15-lobed, leathery; tube turbinate, adhering to ovary; lobes longer than tube, linear-lanceolate, keeled on inner face, valvate, accrescent
• Petals as many as calyx lobes, oblong, concave, bifid, with each lobe and midrib produced into awns, woolly or pilose on margins at base
• Stamens twice as many as petals, in pairs opposite and embraced by petals; filaments shorter than petals; anthers shorter than filaments, linear to linear-oblong, hooked at apex
• Ovary inferior, 2-4-locular, with 2 ovules in each locule; style nearly as long as calyx lobes, shortly 2-4-lobed
• Fruit a turbinate or cylindric leathery berry, wrinkled and crowned with persistent calyx; 1-seeded by abortion
• Seeds 1 by abortion, pendulous, germinating before fruit-fall and developing a hypocotyl with longitudinally ridges
• x = 18 (B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• Bruguiera Savigny
  • Savigny: 696 (1798)
  • Sonder: 514 (1862)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 6, Africa to Asia and Australia
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Bruguiera gymnorrhiza (L.) Lam., KwaZulu-Natal to Eastern Cape on Transkei coast as far south as the Willowvale District