Description:

• Small evergreen trees, scrambling shrubs or lianas, unarmed, glabrous; bark with yellow pigment usually present or hardly discernible
• Branchlets 4-lined to subangular
• Leaves opposite, elliptic to ovate, entire to crenulate-denticulate; stipules minute, triangular, brownish black, marcescent
• Inflorescences sessile or pedunculate, axillary, compact thyrsoid with cymules along straight central axis, or irregularly dichasial
• Flowers bisexual, sessile
• Sepals 4(5), equal, widely ovate
• Petals 4(5), cream to white, widely elliptic to ovate; margin entire
• Disc fleshy, entire
• Stamens 4(5), ± erect, arising from and united at base with margin of disc; anthers introrse
• Ovary ± immersed in and adnate to disc, 2-locular, with 2 erect, collateral, hypotropous, ventral ovules per locule; style very short or absent; stigma usually conspicuously lobed
• Fruit baccate, red to purple or purplish black, spheroid; mesocarp fleshy
• Seeds 1 or 2 per fruit, spheroid; seed-coat brown; endosperm present, fleshy; embryo erect, with fleshy, widely elliptic to widely ovate cotyledons

Nomenclature:

• Lauridia Eckl. & Zeyh.
  • Ecklon & Zeyher: 124 (1834/1835)
  • Sonder: 468 (1860)
  • Hooker: 363 (1862)
  • Davison: 338 (1927)
  • Robson: 39 (1965) in part
  • Archer & Van Wyk: 227 (1997)
• Cassine L. in part
  • Davison: 331 (1927)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 2, endemic to Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Eastern Cape