Description:

• Deciduous or evergreen trees or shrubs; buds covered with imbricate scales
• Leaves alternate or clustered, entire or glandular-serrulate, petiolate, usually with 2 or sometimes more glands at base; stipules small, usually free, sometimes intrapetiolarly connate, caducous
• Inflorescences usually racemes, solitary in axils of leaves, with more than 10 flowers; bracts small, lower ones often empty and tripartite or tridentate, caducous
• Flowers bisexual or occasionally a few male with ± reduced ovaries present
• Calyx: tube obconical, urceolate or cylindrical, with an adnate glandular disc inside; lobes 5, caducous, imbricate
• Petals 5, white or pink
• Stamens 10-20(-85), perigynous, free, arising with petals in throat of calyx tube; filaments free; anthers often glabrous
• Ovary superior, consisting of 1 carpel, 1-locular, sessile; ovules 2, collateral, pendulous; style elongate; stigma peltate, capitate, or truncate
• Fruit an ovoid to globose drupe; mesocarp fleshy-juicy; endocarp very hard, ovoid-globular, wrinkled or smooth, 1- or 2-seeded
• Seed pendulous; testa membranous; pericarp dry
• x = 8 (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Prunus L.
  • Linnaeus: 473 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 213 (1754)
  • Jussieu: 341 (1789)
  • Kunth: 241 (1823)
  • Hooker: 609 (1865)
  • Zohary: 24 (1972)
  • Bailey & Bailey: 918 (1977)
  • Meikle: 607 (1977)
  • Hedberg: 41 (1989)
  • Pooley: 116 (1993)
  • Van Wyk & Van Wyk: 152 (1997)
• Prunus subgen. Laurocerasus Kalkm.
  • Kalkman: 25 (1965)
• Pygeum Gaertn.
  • Gaertner: 218, t. 46 (1788)
  • Koehne: 177 (1913)
  • Graham: 45 (1960)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 200, fairly cosmopolitan in temperate regions, particularly abundant in North America, E Asia, and S Europe, containing many important fruit trees, like Plum, Peach, Apricot, etc.
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Prunus africana (Hook.f.) Kalkm., indigenous, from tropical Africa, Zimbabwe into the Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho and Eastern Cape