Description:

• Trees or, more often, lax to bushy shrubs, sometimes straggling; bark usually stringy; indumentum mainly of stellate or tufted, uni- or multicellular hairs, often lepidote and with simple, thick-walled or glandular hairs as well
• Leaves simple, usually palmately nerved; stipules present
• Flowers in highly variable cymose axillary inflorescences; floral bracts 3, caducous, pubescent on both surfaces, close to calyx or scattered, usually free
• Calyx 5-lobed, pubescent on outside; tube short, usually with 5 patches of papillae just below base of lobes within; lobes reflexed in mature flowers
• Petals 5, usually obliquely obovate, cuneate (shaped like a butterfly wing), white or in varying shades of rose, sometimes flecked or veined with purplish red or deep rose at base, persistent, turning cinnamon-rufous with age
• Stamens 10-40, usually 15, united at base into a short tube; filaments of different lengths in groups of 3-8 (occasionally 2 or 4), alternating with 5 narrowly linear-spathulate staminodes; anthers oblong, thecae parallel
• Ovary 3-5-locular, sutures often partly bristly pubescent inside; style 3-5-branched; ovules 2-8 in each locule
• Capsule subglobose, loculicidally dehiscent
• Seeds globose to obovate-oblong, triquetrous; testa hard, rough with minute ridges, dots or pits
• x = 7, 9, 10 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Dombeya Cav.
  • Cavanilles: 8 (1786) name conserved
  • Harvey: 220 (1860)
  • Wild: 518 (1961)
  • Friedrich-Holzhammer, Merxmüller & Roessler: 2 (1969)
  • Verdoorn & Herman: 1 (1986)
  • Seyani: 1 (1991)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species more than 300 described species, 19 in Africa, also present in Arabian Peninsula, Madagascar, Comores and Mascarenes
• Southern Africa: Species 8, widespread