Description:

• Small evergreen shrubs to spreading trees, unarmed, glabrous; bark greyish with layers of powdery yellow pigment in exposed bark
• Branchlets terete or slightly flattened, greyish brown
• Leaves opposite; lamina widely elliptic to circular, dark green above, grey-green below, base rounded to cuneate, apex rounded to retuse, margin entire, revolute, coriaceous and rigid; venation brochidodromus, slightly raised above and more prominent below, midrib and petiole very conspicuous below owing to whitish green colour contrasting with grey-green lamina in dried leaves; petiolate; stipules minute, ± triangular, brownish black, marcescent
• Inflorescences sessile, ± irregularly dichasial, axillary towards apices of branchlets, 4-10-flowered; bracts minute
• Flowers often unisexual with staminodes, or bisexual; shortly pedicellate
• Sepals 5, rudimentary
• Petals 5, white, ovate, sessile, apex rounded, margin ± deflexed
• Disc fleshy, entire, undulate
• Stamens 5, ± erect; inserted below margin of disc; filaments of perfect flowers relatively long, well exserted above flowers; filaments of female flowers rudimentary (staminodes); anthers basifixed, introrse
• Ovary ± immersed in and adnate to disc, 2(3)-locular with 2 pendulous collateral ovules per locule; ovules epitropous, dorsal; styles short; stigma in female flowers often conspicuously 2-lobed, papillate, stigma inconspicuous in perfect flowers
• Fruit baccate, pale red, spheroid, mesocarp fleshy
• Seeds 1 or 2 per locule (up to 5 per fruit), brown, ± spheroid; endosperm fleshy; embryo erect, with cotyledons fleshy, widely elliptic, base unequal

Nomenclature:

• Maurocenia Mill.
  • Miller: [859] (1754)
  • Sonder: 465 (1860)
  • Kuntze: 147 (1891), in part
  • Davison: 343 (1927)
  • Loesener: 179 (1942)
  • Archer & Van Wyk: 7 (1998)
• Maurocenia Mill. subg. Eumaurocenia Kuntze
  • Kuntze: 149 (1891)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Monotypic: Maurocenia frangula Mill. (note spelling of specific epithet), restricted to kloofs or coastal bush in Cape Peninsula and the West Coast National Park, Western Cape