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A small shrub. It grows 20 cm high. It forms colonies from branched underground stems. The branches are erect. The leaves are dark green above and paler underneath. They are leathery and in rings of 3 or opposite in twos. The leaves are 4-16 cm long by 2-6 cm wide. The leaves do not have hairs. The flowers are in groups in the axils of leaves. The flowers are green. The fruit are green and 2 cm across. They turn yellow when ripe.
Inflorescences borne in the lower axils, including the lowest from which the leaves have fallen or were never fully developed, few to c. 40-flowered, much branched, up to 4 cm long; peduncles (5)10–20 mm long; secondary cymose branches sometimes elongate, up to 30 mm long with the flowers spaced; pedicels 3–7 mm long; bracts and bracteoles 3–7 × 0.5 mm, narrowly elliptic-lanceolate, acuminate.
Corolla slender, acuminate in bud; red or greenish, bristly pubescent or glabrous; tube 3–4 mm long; lobes 4–5 mm long, oblong-lanceolate, reflexed or sometimes probably erect, apex acuminate to shortly tailed.
Suffrutex with 3–6 slender stems 17–30 cm tall from a fairly slender ± horizontal rhizome; glabrous, or stems covered with dense short spreading rather bristly hairs and also some longer appressed ones.
Calyx tube globose, about 1 mm in diameter, bristly pubescent; lobes leaf-like, 0.8–2.5(5) × 0.3–0.8 mm, narrowly oblong, elliptic or lanceolate, glabrous or sparsely bristly pubescent.
Fruits 25–30 × 15–20 mm, oblong, subglobose or pyriform, containing (1)2 pyrenes, each 12 × 6 mm, glabrous.
Ovary 2-locular, filled with dark-coloured material.
