Leaves often crowded at ends of branches, palmatifid, or digitately divided, or twice digitately divided, petioled; leaflets entire to variously divided; stipules adnate to petiole
Flowers in dense spikes or racemes
Calyx 5-toothed or subentire; tube subcylindric to obsolete above ovary
Petals 5, often somewhat fleshy, valvate
Stamens 5; filaments often fleshy; anthers ovate, subequal to filaments
Disc flat, depressed or conical in middle
Ovary 2-locular; styles 2, short or elongated, often thick and stigmatose on inner face
Fruit fleshy, laterally compressed or subglobose
Seeds globose to oblong and planoconvex in cross-section
Nomenclature:
Cussonia Thunb.
Thunberg: 210 (1780)
Sonder: 568 (1862)
Strey: 191 (1973)
Strey: 515 (1975)
Cannon: 621 (1978)
Reyneke: 243 (1981)
Reyneke: 369 (1984)
Reyneke & Kok: 317 (1987)
Distribution & Notes:
Global: Species 25, tropical to southern Africa and Mascarene Islands
Southern Africa: Species ± 10, Botswana, Northern Province, North-West, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Northern, Western and Eastern Cape
REYNEKE, W.F. 1981. 'n Morfologies-taksonomiese studie van die familie Araliaceae in suidelike Afrika. D.Sc. study, University of Pretoria, Pretoria
REYNEKE, W.F. 1984. A new species of Cussonia (Araliaceae) from the Transvaal. South African Journal of Botany 36
REYNEKE, W.F. & KOK, P.D.F. 1987. Two varieties of Cussonia paniculata Eckl. & Zeyh. South African Journal of Botany 53
SONDER, O.W. 1862. Araliaceae. Flora capensis 2
STREY, R.G. 1973. Notes on the genus Cussonia in South Africa. Bothalia 11
STREY, R.G. 1975. Araliaceae. A new species of Cussonia from the southern Cape. Bothalia 11
THUNBERG, C.P. 1780. Cussonia. Nova Acta Regiae Societatis Scientiarum Upsaliensis 3
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Welcome to Biodiversity Advisor 2.0!
Biodiversity Advisor, developed by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) and its Data Partners, is a system that will provide integrated biodiversity information to a wide range of users who will have access to geospatial data, plant and animal species distribution data, ecosystem-level data, literature, images and metadata.
The integrated information comes from our much-loved Botanical Database of Southern Africa (BODATSA) also known as Plants of Southern Africa (POSA), Zoological Database of Southern Africa (ZODATSA), Biodiversity Geographic Information System (BGIS), SANBI's institutional repository (Opus) and others.
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