Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees 4–7(–10) m tall, usually with hard, dark red or black wood, pubescence usually of simple hairs, sometimes the hairs branched or glandular.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or sometimes subopposite. Blades oblong–elliptic or occasionally elliptic–lanceolate, (7.4–)8–16 cm long, (3–)4–6(–7) cm wide. Apex obtuse, rounded, emarginate, or sometimes acute. Surfaces glabrous; dark green, coriaceous. Margins entire. Upper surface conspicuously reticulate–pitted, lower surface usually inconspicuously reticulate. Petioles 0.4–0.9 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers solitary, sometimes the staminate ones in clusters of 2–5, subtended by ca. 3 broad, coriaceous, caducous bracts with ciliate margins, otherwise glabrous. Flowers usually small, unisexual (and the plants usually dioecious or sometimes monoecious), actinomorphic. Calyx coriaceous, 3-lobed, the lobes triangular, ca. 4–5 mm long, enlarging to ca.7–8 mm long in fruit, glabrous, apex acute. Corolla urceolate, erect, ca. 7 mm long, 3-lobed, densely appressed pubescent on back of lobes. Staminate flowers with 9 stamens; pistillate flowers with Stamens absent; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits or rarely by apical pores. Ovary superior, vestigial in staminate flowers; styles 1–4, nearly distinct to connate.

Fruit: Fruit usually a juicy to leathery or chartaceous berry; rarely a capsules; pale orange; dry; pericarp chartaceous; obovoid to subglobose; 1.6–2.6 cm long; densely appressed puberulent toward apex when young; glabrate with age. Seeds 1–5; dark brown; ellipsoid when solitary; crescent–shaped; when more than 1; 3–sided in cross section; 1.2–1.4 cm long; seed coat thin; endosperm copious and hard.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Scattered to common; primarily in diverse mesic forest.

Elevation Range: 150–760 m.