Description:

• Trees or shrubs, glabrous, usually with milky latex; mostly dioecious, rarely monoecious
• Leaves alternate or opposite, entire or crenulate; stipules minute or absent
• Flowers in uni- or occasionally bisexual, axillary spikes; male dense, female lax
• Petals 0
• Disc 0
• Male flowers sessile or subsessile; calyx small, (2)3(-5)-lobed; lobes slightly imbricate; stamens (2)3(-8), exserted; filaments free; anthers longitudinally dehiscent; ovary 0
• Female flowers shortly pedunculate; calyx (2)3-lobed; ovary (2)3-locular, each locule with 1 ovary; styles 3, shortly connate at base, entire
• Fruit a large, inflated capsule breaking into (2)3 bivalved cocci; valves separating and coiling up; exocarp smooth, not separating from endocarp; endocarp thinly crustaceous; columella present
• Seeds globose or ovoid, caruncle (? swollen funicle) separating from seed and remaining adnate to columella; testa crustaceous; albumen fleshy; cotyledons broad, flat
• x = 11, 12 (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Excoecaria L.
  • Linnaeus: 1288 (1759)
  • Prain: 1018 (1913)
  • Léonard: 133 (1959)
  • Radcliffe-Smith: 382 (1987)
  • Webster: 122 (1994)
  • Radcliffe-Smith: 315 (1996)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 40, Africa to Asia and Australia
• Southern Africa: Species 2, Namibia, Botswana, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape