Picramnia Sw.

Shrubs or trees, usually with slender curving branches, the bark and wood often quite bitter to the taste. Leaves alternate, odd-or even-pinnate; leaflets (3-)6-20, alternate to opposite, usually entire, chartaceous to coriaceous, petio-luled. Inflorescences long, slender, many-flowered racemes or panicles, aggre-gated to solitary, terminal to axillary. Flowers small, 3-, 4-, or 5-merous, unisexual, the plants dioecious; sepals 3-5, connate at least basally, imbricate; petals 3-5, or sometimes absent, linear to elliptic or lanceolate, ca. as long as or a little longer than the sepals, imbricate; stamens as many as and opposite the petals, reduced to staminodes or absent in carpellate flowers, exserted, the filaments inserted between and below the lobes of the small intrastaminal disc, rarely adnate to the petals, the anthers basifixed, 2-lobed, the lobes separated by a thick connective; gynoecium 2-3-carpelled, syncarpous, rudimentary or absent in staminate flowers, 2-3-lobed and-loculed, the ovules 2 per locule, pendulous, anatropous and epi-tropous, placentation axile, the style bilobed, persistent and spreading in fruit, the upper surface stigmatiferous, absent in staminate flowers. Fruit a berry, obovoid to ellipsoid, 1-3-loculed; seeds 1-3, 1 per locule, the testa membranace-ous, the endosperm absent.