Description:

• Deciduous trees or rarely shrubs; crown spreading, branches without spines; bark mostly grey and smooth, sometimes brown and fissured; plants monoecious or rarely polygamonoecious
• Leaves alternate, usually asymmetrical at base, dentate to entire, 3-5-nerved from base to penninerved, cystoliths often present, giving scabrous texture to mature leaves, petiolate; stipules small, lateral, free, caducous
• Inflorescences: male inflorescences cymose or fasciculate; female axillary, solitary or few-flowered clusters
• Flowers usually unisexual, male and female on same plants, along with a few bisexual flowers, pedicellate on branches of current year, appearing with leaves in mid- or late spring
• Perianth: lobes 4 or 5
• Male flowers globular; perianth lobes imbricate in bud, free, recurved at anthesis; stamens 4 or 5, with filaments arising on pilose receptacle, connate at base, incurved in bud, exserted after anthesis; anthers dorsifixed, extrorse, ovate; ovary rudimentary or absent
• Female flowers with staminodes usually present; ovary 1-locular, ovoid, sessile; style short, sessile, divided into 2 divergent, elongate, widely spreading or ascending lobes, lobes entire or 2-fid
• Fruit a fleshy drupe, ovoid or globose; outer mesocarp thick, firm, inner mesocarp thin, fleshy; endocarp thick-walled, bony, smooth or rugose, persisting after leaves fall
• Seed without endosperm; embryo curved; cotyledons broad
• x = 5 (aneuploids, high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Celtis L.
  • Linnaeus: 1043 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 467 (1754)
  • Adanson: 377 (1763)
  • Jussieu: 408 (1789)
  • Planchon: 168 (1873)
  • Bentham: 354 (1880)
  • Engler: 63 (1889)
  • Rendle: 3 (1916)
  • Brown: 517 (1925)
  • Polhill: 139 (1964)
  • Polhill: 4 (1966)
  • Polhill: 266 (1989)
  • Wilmot-Dear: 6 (1991)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 60, widespread in tropical and temperate regions mostly of the northern hemisphere; fewer than 10 in Africa
• Southern Africa: Species 3, the northern provinces, Swaziland, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Western and Eastern Cape.
  • Alien species such as *Celtis australis L. (Nettle tree) and *C. sinensis Pers. (Chinese hackberry), sometimes found as garden escapes, may be confused with the local species