Description:

• Trees, shrubs or scramblers; sometimes with runners
• Leaves petioled, simple, mostly serrate, often gland-dotted
• Flowers bi- or unisexual, usually in axillary racemes or panicles
• Calyx persistent, bibracteate at base, with (4)5 sepals, imbricate
• Corolla campanulate, longer than calyx with spreading lobes, connate at base into a short tube
• Stamens arising in mouth of corolla tube; filaments usually long, very rarely short or 0; anthers oblong-cordate, often emarginate, dorsifixed at or below middle, dehiscing by longitudinal slits or aborted
• Ovary inferior or semi-inferior; style short or almost obsolete; stigma often distinctly or indistinctly lobed; ovules usually many, arranged in several rows on placenta
• Fruit small, indehiscent, dry or fleshy, globose, ovoid or subturbinate, crowned with persistent style and calyx, several-seeded
• Seeds small, embedded in placenta, irregularly polyhedral, globose or turbinate; embryo oblique or almost transverse
• x = 10 (6)

Nomenclature:

• Maesa Forssk.
  • Forsskål: 66 (1775)
  • Candolle: 77 (1844)
  • Baker: 491 (1877)
  • Mez: 15 (1902)
  • Harvey & Wright: 432 (1906)
  • Phillips: 562 (1951)
  • Dyer: 1 (1963)
  • Kupicha: 198 (1983)
  • Halliday: 2 (1984)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 200, tropics of Old World
• Southern Africa: Species 2: Maesa lanceolata Forssk., Northern Province, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape; M. alnifolia Harv., KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape