Description:

• Lianas, shrubs, or small trees; branches cylindric or clearly lobed, often ending in a tendrilloid tip; lenticels usually present
• Leaves: leaflets many-jugate, opposite or subopposite, usually ± symmetric
• Inflorescences axillary, paniculate or racemose, frequently more than 1 per axil of sometimes rudimentary leaf, sometimes 1-more together at end of leafy branch and resembling a terminal inflorescence; pedicel always with a distinct joint
• Flowers bisexual, heterodistylous, sweet-scented, usually produced before leaves
• Sepals free or almost completely connate, imbricate in bud, ciliate, persistent and usually accrescent soon after pollination
• Petals as long as to much longer than sepals, free or connivent near base, often lorate and inrolled or folded, white often with a trace of yellow or red, glabrous or with a few apical hairs
• Stamens: filaments connate into a short tube below, glabrous
• Gynoecium of 5, free, glabrous to glabrescent carpels; ovules 2, basal; styles terete; stigmas ± capitate
• Follicles 1-5 per flower, ovate to elliptic with rounded to acute apex or beaked, glabrous or velutinous, and/or with orange to red or rarely white glandular hairs outside, glabrous inside, with persistent calyx, dehiscing by a ventral suture or circumscissile at base
• Seed solitary, rarely 2 per follicle, usually extruded, subovoid to ellipsoid, enclosed or partially so in a brightly coloured sarcotesta (aril) fused with the partly to almost totally fleshy testa; hilum basal; endosperm 0 in mature seed
• x = 14 (1 report)

Nomenclature:

• Rourea Aubl.
  • Aublet: 467 (1775) name conserved
  • Jussieu: 369 (1789)
  • Baillon: 228 (1867)
  • Jongkind: 310 (1989)
• Byrsocarpus Thonn. ex Schumach.
  • Schumacher: 246 (1827)
  • Hooker: 431 (1862)
  • Gilg: 66 (1894)
  • Hemsley: 15 (1956)
  • Mendes: 622 (1966)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 40-70, circumtropical, occurring in forests and savannas
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Rourea orientalis Baill., Caprivi and Botswana