Description:

• Trees or shrubs, with 4-angled branchlets
• Leaves opposite, petiolate, simple, entire, obovate, elliptic or lanceolate, often acuminate, glabrous, often smelling of almonds when crushed (a cyanogenic glycoside); stipules rudimentary
• Flowers bisexual, regular, small, in short, axillary, trichotomous cymes, arranged in lax racemes, shorter than subtending leaf; bracts opposite, up to length of flowers, often deciduous
• Calyx 4- or 5-lobed on rim of tube/hypanthium, conspicuous, often considered to be petals, obovate- or linear-spathulate, white or pinkish, usually pubescent at base; tube/hypanthium adnate to ovary and slightly exceeding it
• Petals (4)5, arising in throat of calyx tube, minute, scale-like (perhaps not representing petals), alternating with, and much shorter than sepals, incurved and closing tube in bud, spreading and reflexed at anthesis exposing stamens, valvate, usually pink, pubescent
• Stamens (4)5, arising in calyx tube below petals; filaments very short; anthers small, didymous, 2-thecous, opening by longitudinal slits
• Ovary inferior, of (3)4 or 5 fused carpels, 3-5-locular, with ± 3 pendulous, superposed, hemitropous, bitegmic ovules on axile placentas in each locule; style straight; stigma thickened
• Fruit a false drupe, thinly fleshy, globose, about the size of a pea, red to reddish brown, marked by a circular scar left by deciduous hypanthium; with 1 seed per locule
• Seeds somewhat obovoid, with thick, brown, warty testa; cotyledon spiral or irregularly folded; endosperm 0
• x = 10 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Oliniaceae
  • Hofmeyer & Phillips: 97 (1922)
  • Dahlgren & Van Wyk: 40 (1988)

Distribution & Notes:

• Genus 1, species 8-10, eastern and southern Africa

References:

• DAHLGREN, R. & VAN WYK, A.E. 1988. Structures and relationships of families endemic to or centered in southern Africa. Monographs in Systematic Botany from the Missouri Botanical Garden 25
• HOFMEYER, J. & PHILLIPS, E.P. 1922. The genus Olinia. Bothalia 1

Resources:

• Oliniaceae genus: Olinia