Description:

• Small trees, shrubs or rhizomatous suffrutices, spinescent, usually with long shoots and weakly or well-developed brachyblasts
• Spines slender to very robust, straight, axillary or terminating brachyblasts, occasionally leafy and/or floriferous
• Branches terete, angular to striate-angular, often drooping; bark smooth or flaking, lenticels occasionally present
• Leaves alternate or fasciculate on brachyblasts, glabrous or puberulous, entire or with irregular to regular teeth, subsessile or shortly petiolate; stipules free, subulate, marcescent
• Inflorescence a subdichasium or dichasium, few- to many-flowered, fasciculate in axils of leaves or branches or on spines
• Flowers mostly functionally unisexual with staminodes in female and pistillodes in male flowers, pedicels articulate at or near base
• Sepals 5, equal, imbricate in bud, margin fimbriate, ciliate or rarely subentire
• Petals 5, imbricate in bud, margin ciliate or laciniate, rarely entire, spreading or reflexed
• Disc intrastaminal, convex or concave, 5-10-lobed, yellow or red
• Stamens 5, arising at base of disc; anthers introrse
• Ovary a quarter to half immersed in disc, (2)3(4)-locular with 2(3) erect, collateral ovules per locule; style terete, short or elongate; stigma (2)3(4)-lobed
• Fruit a dry capsule opening longitudinally, loculicidal and septifragal, globose, obconic, trigonous, triquetrous, pyriform or conic-pyramidal, smooth to rugose, veined; pericarp semifleshy, chartaceous, coriaceous, woody or ridged
• Seeds 1-4, glossy, reddish brown or black; aril fleshy or thin, completely to partially covering seed, or reduced to a rim at base of seed
• x = 10 (9) (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Gymnosporia (Wight & Arn.) Hook.f.
  • Hooker: 365 (1862) emend. Loesener: (1942) name conserved
  • Davison: 290 (1927) in part
  • Marais: 381 (1960) in part
  • Robson: 358 (1966) in part
  • Sebsebe Demisew: 45 (1985) in part
  • Robson et al.: 3 (1994) in part
  • Jordaan & Van Wyk: 177 (1999)
• Celastrus sect. Gymnosporia Wight & Arnott
  • Wight & Arnott: 159 (1834)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 80, extending over most of Africa and Madagascar, as far north as Spain in southern Europe and eastwards as far as India, Sri Lanka, Malesia and NE Australia and Polynesian Islands
• Southern Africa: Species 30, widely distributed