Description:

• Trees with dense canopies or vigorous shrubs with tendency to scramble; branches with straight, sharp, tough, axillary spines, often paired; young branches often zigzagging; plants monoecious or dioecious
• Leaves alternate, entire on young plants, singly serrate on mature plants, pinnately veined, glabrous, minutely punctate on lower surface, scabrous when mature, apex with hair-like bristle at tip, base slightly asymmetric, shortly petiolate; stipules large, connate along one margin, enclosing terminal bud, caducous
• Inflorescences many-flowered axillary cymes or panicles, usually congested, male or with 1(2) females near base; remaining female flowers solitary and in upper axils
• Flowers unisexual, greenish, subtended by small, ovate, ± amplexicaul bracts
• Perianth: lobes 5, deeply concave, with inflexed sides, with male buds induplicate-valvate, and female buds imbricate
• Male flowers with 5 stamens, included in cavity of perianth lobes; pistillodes present
• Female flowers with 1 perianth lobe smaller than others, without staminodes
• Ovary 1-locular, pubescent, sessile; styles 2, long, unbranched, divaricate, densely hairy-stigmatose, persistent
• Fruit a drupe, thinly fleshy, globose; endocarp stony
• Seed without endosperm; embryo curved
• x = 10 (aneuploids)

Nomenclature:

• Chaetachme Planch.
  • Planchon: 266 & 340 (1848)
  • Engler: 66 (1889)
  • Brown: 520 (1925)
  • Polhill:144 (1964)
  • Polhill: 12 (1966)
  • Wilmot-Dear: 1 (1991)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 4 (?), confined to tropical and southern Africa and Madagascar
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Chaetachme aristata Planch., Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape and as far south as Knysna in the Western Cape