Description:

• Shrubs or shrublets, sometimes small trees, with furrowed branches and distinct lenticels; plants dioecious
• Leaves alternate, simple, entire, penninerved, shortly petiolate, ± glabrous, coriaceous, elliptic or lanceolate, deciduous; stipules 0
• Flowers unisexual, regular, small
• Male flowers in few-flowered, terminal corymbs; calyx tube expanded, shortly 4-lobed, persistent; petals 4, free, fleshy, rounded, imbricate, deciduous, white; stamens 4, inserted under margin of disc, alternating with petals; filaments linear, shorter than the oblong, extrorse anthers; disc basin-shaped, large, yellow-green; ovary 0 or rudimentary
• Female flowers solitary or in groups of 2(3); calyx tube fusiform, adnate to ovary, very shortly 4-toothed; petals as in male; staminodes 0 or rudimentary; disc epigynous, somewhat fleshy, 4-angled; ovary inferior, 2-carpellate, imperfectly 2-locular, ellipsoid; placentas 2, axile, each placenta with up to 12 ovules in 2 longitudinal series; style short, thick, 2-branched from middle, each branch ending in a large, horseshoe-shaped stigma
• Fruit a 1-locular, subwoody, ellipsoid capsule, crowned by persistent calyx lobes, disc and style, opening by 2 valves, with seeds on the 2 free-central, somewhat fleshy placentas
• Seeds flat, winged, arranged on each placenta in 2 rows like rooftiles; testa pustulate; endosperm 0; embryo straight; cotyledons broadly oblong
• x = 17

Nomenclature:

• Montinia Thunb.
  • Thunberg: 108 (1777)
  • Jussieu: 318 (1789)
  • Smith: 14, t. 15 (1792)
  • Candolle: 35 (1828)
  • Harvey: 307 (1862)
  • Hooker: 794 (1867)
  • Engler: 223 (1928)
  • Adamson: 440 (1950)
  • Milne-Redhead: tt. 3541-3544 (1955)
  • Friedrich-Holzhammer: 1 (1967)
  • Mendes: 54 (1978)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Monotypic: Montinia caryophyllacea Thunb., SW Angola; Namibia, Botswana, Northern, Western and Eastern Cape