Description:

• Trees or shrubs, often with watery latex; dioecious, rarely monoecious
• Leaves often large, alternate, petiolate, usually 3-7-nerved from base
• Inflorescence a raceme or spike, lateral or forming a terminal, thyrsoid panicle, with male flowers glomerulate, several to a bract and female flowers solitary to each bract
• Petals 0
• Disc 0
• Male flowers: calyx splitting into 3 or 4 valvate lobes; stamens (1)2 or 3(few); filaments short, usually free; anthers (2)4-thecous and (2)4-valved; pistil 0
• Female flowers: calyx widely cupular or obliquely spathaceous, rarely splitting into 2 or 3 lobes; ovary (1)2- or 3(4)-locular, with a single ovule in each locule, sometimes glandular; styles free or shortly connate at base, sometimes 1, ligulate
• Fruit a capsule with (1)2-several cocci, with cocci bivalved, granular-glandular, becoming smooth and glabrous when glands rub off
• Seeds subglobose, smooth, shiny, exotesta fleshy, endotesta crustaceous; albumen fleshy; cotyledons broad, flat
• x = 11 (10)

Nomenclature:

• Macaranga Thouars
  • Thouars: 26 (1806)
  • Prain: 485 (1920)
  • Radcliffe-Smith: 239 (1987)
  • Webster: 87 (1994)
  • Radcliffe-Smith: 161 (1996)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 300, mainly tropics of the Old World
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Macaranga capensis (Baill.) Sim, coastal forests of KwaZulu-Natal to border of Eastern Cape