Ebenaceae |
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Flora of Somalia 3: 6-11 Plants trees or shrubs, dioecious; trunks often with dark brown or black hardwood. Leaves simple, alternate, entire, without stipules. Inflorescences usually cymose and terminating with a flower, sometimes false racemes or inflorescences reduced to a single flower on a bracteate peduncle. Flowers radially symmetric, unisexual but usually with rudiments of the other sex, 3-8-merous. Calyces of united sepals, entire and truncate to deeply lobed, persistent in fruit and usually enlarging. Corollas of united petals, shortly to deeply lobed;, the tube sometimes fleshy and constricted at the throat, the lobes twisted to the left in bud. Stamens from (2- )3 to over 100, attached to the corolla-tube or borne on the receptacle, exserted or included; filaments often very short; anthers basifixed, often of unequal size and often more than one on the same filament. Staminodes present or, rarely, absent in female flowers. Pistillode present or, rarely, absent in male flowers. Ovary superior, with 2- 8 carpels fused to the base of the styles, each carpel with 2 ovules, sometimes divided by a false septum, into 2 1-ovulate cells; styles equal in number to the carpels, distinct or united at the base, very rarely completely united, stigmatic region usually large and conspicuous. Fruit usually a berry, rarely a fleshy, tardily dehiscent capsule. Seeds large, with a distinct circum-peripheral vascular loop; hilum, small, inconspicuous. There are 4 genera and about 855 species in the Ebenaceae. They grow throughout the tropics and subtropics of both hemispheres, with most species in the Indo-Pacific region, but with a center of variation in Africa. The position of the embryo in the endosperm is important for separating the genera. In Diospyros the embryo is straight or curved in one plane and at most the lower half of the radicle is in a special 'pouch' formed by ingrowth of the testa. In Euclea the embryo with the cotyledons is twisted at a right angle to the radicle and the radicle is surrounded by an ingrowth of the testa for the whole of its length. Key to the genera in Somaliland and Somalia, the world Description based on treatment in the Flora of Somalia (©The Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Reproduced with permission), but some modifications have been made to reflect the findings of Duangjai et al. (2006). References Stevens, P. F. (2020). Angiosperm Phylogeny Website, ver. 14, accessed 2020-08-21.
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