Description:

• Shrubs or trees with smooth and flaking, fibrous or papery bark
• Leaves alternate, often variable in shape within species but mostly almost elliptic, apex various, base sessile or shortly petiolate, often varying within species, margins entire, surface variously curved, often recurved and incurved in different parts of the same leaf; texture often thick or firm; often aromatic, occasionally lemon-scented; stipules minute, usually seen only about flowers
• Flowers 2-bracteolate, often pedicellate, in axils of bracts on condensed shoots or, rarely, as monads in leaf axils
• Calyx: hypanthium obtuse or variously tapered at base and erect or spreading above at anthesis
• Sepals 5, imbricate, persistent or deciduous
• Petals 5, spreading, conspicuous, deciduous, white, pink or red
• Stamens usually shorter than petals, in 5 antepetalous groups but appearing free, spread evenly along rim of hypanthium; anthers versatile, conspicuous gland near connective and thickened area at base of each theca
• Ovary (2)3-5 or more-locular; ovules few to many, anatropous; style simple, base usually inset in a depression in ovary summit; stigma entire or occasionally somewhat lobed
• Fruit a rigid or woody capsule with valves opening at top
• Seeds somewhat ovoid; testa reticulate, occasionally ridged or winged or irregularly linear and striate
• x = 11 (aneuploids, polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• *Leptospermum J.R.Forst. & G.Forst.
  • Forster & Forster: pl. 71 t. 36 (1776)
  • Adamson: 604 (1950)
  • Levyns: 207 (1966)
  • Thompson: 339 (1989)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 80, Australia
• Southern Africa: Species 1: *Leptospermum laevigatum F.Muell., Australian Myrtle, naturalised on Cape Flats (Western Cape)