Description:

• Small trees or shrubs
• Leaves alternate to opposite or rarely subverticillate, penninerved, glabrous, often aromatic
• Inflorescences axillary, consisting of false umbels with up to ± 15 flowers arranged in (sometimes condensed) racemes, before anthesis with an involucre of decussate, usually persistent bracts, appearing with or before new leaves
• Flowers unisexual, 3-merous
• Perianth: tube almost flat to deeply cup-shaped, persistent and enlarged as a ± developed fruit cup on a usually not enlarged pedicel
• Tepals 0-9, equal or unequal, yellow, green, or white, glabrous, often caducous during anthesis
• Male flowers with 5-20 fertile stamens, several inner ones with glands (irregularly 3-merous flowers with 9 stamens, the third whorl with 2 glands); filaments usually longer than anthers; anthers 4-locular, all introrse or basal pair of third staminal whorl lateral; staminodes usually 0; pistillode well developed to 0; receptacle small and flat
• Female flowers with 9-12 staminodes
• Ovary globose or ovoid; style thick; stigma dilate
• Fruit a red drupe, globose-ovoid or subcylindrical, seated in a ± developed cup or disc; tepals usually deciduous
• x = 12 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Litsea Lam.
  • Lamarck: 574 (1792) name conserved
  • Meisner: 220 (1864)
  • Bentham: 161 (1880)
  • Pax: 119 (1889)
  • Hooker: 155 (1890)
  • Kostermans: 240 (1957)
  • Van der Werff: 385 (1991)
  • Rohwer: 388 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 400, Asia with fewer in Australia and the Pacific Islands, a few in North and South America, none native in Africa or Europe
• Southern Africa: Species 1: *Litsea sebifera Pers., introduced from Asia into N KwaZulu-Natal and now naturalised on forest margins