Description:

• Dioecious, prostrate or climbing, glabrous or scabrid herbs with (always?) tuberous rootstock
• Leaves digitately 3-5-lobed, with lobes often toothed, usually cordate
• Tendrils simple or bifid
• Male flowers in racemes: calyx short, 5-lobed, tube turbinate or campanulate, glabrous, lobes linear; corolla 5-lobed, tube campanulate, sometimes glandular within, lobes broadly elliptic or ovate, sometimes bluntly apiculate, membranous, sometimes glandular; stamens 3, filaments partly free or connate to form a broad flattened structure, anthers sometimes cohering to form a flattened disc, with one anther 1-thecous and the others 2-thecous, thecae bent; pistil 0
• Female flowers solitary: calyx and corolla as in male; staminodes 3; ovary ovoid, narrowly elliptic or flattened and linear or oblong, with 3 placentas and many ovules, style columnar, stigmas 3, fleshy or flattened, glandular
• Fruit a many-seeded berry, cylindric or ellipsoid
• Seeds much compressed, obliquely obovate to oblong, often tomentose, with crustaceous testa
• x = 12 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Coccinia Wight & Arn.
  • Wight & Arnott: 347 (1834)
  • Meeuse: 95 (1962)
  • Jeffrey: 442 (1978)
• Cephalandra Eckl. & Zeyh.
  • Ecklon & Zeyher: 280 (1836)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 30, Old World, all but 1 confined to Africa
• Southern Africa: Species 7, all regions