Uapaca Baill.

Dioecious pachycaul vernicifluous trees or shrubs with a simple and/or lepidote indumentum; trunks often with buttress-roots; twigs often strongly marked with leaf-scars. Leaves alternate, usually crowded towards the ends of the branches, petiolate or subsessile, stipulate or not, simple, entire, penninerved. Inflorescences axillary, solitary or fasciculate, pedunculate, with a whorl of 5–10 imbricate involucrate tepaloid bracts surrounding the flowers; ♂ inflorescences many-flowered, the flowers in dense globose capitula; ♀ inflorescences 1-flowered. Male flowers sessile; calyx campanulate or turbinate, truncate, dentate, irregularly split or regularly 5–more-lobed, the lobes imbricate; petals 0; disc 0; stamens (4–)5(–6), free, episepalous, anthers erect, basifixed, introrse, thecae parallel, longitudinally dehiscent; pistillode cylindric-obconic, and often infundibuliform, hypocrateriform, or pileiform and sometimes lobate. Female flowers sessile; calyx minute, truncate or sinuate, disc-like; petals 0; disc 0; ovary (2–)3(–5)-locular, with 2 ovules per locule; styles (2–)3(–5), free, thick, recurved, enveloping the ovary, multipartite or laciniate. Fruit drupaceous, indehiscent; mesocarp spongy; pyrenes (2–) 3(–4), dorsally bisulcate, indurate. Seeds mostly 1 per pyrene, compressed, ecarunculate; endosperm fleshy; cotyledons broad, flat.