Peddiea africana flowers

Peddiea africana, the poison-olive, is a much branched shrub or small tree reaching heights from 3 m to 5 m (SA Tree List No. 517).

The leaves are simple, spirally arranged or alternate. They are glossy green, leathery, lanceolate or oblanceolate, with short petioles or sessile.

The flowers are tubular, growing in umbels. The flowers have no petals, the tube being formed by the ribbed calyx that ends in five rounded lobes. Flower colour may be greenish yellow or tinted red-brown or maroon.

The fruit is an ovoid berry that turns purple or black when ripe, sometimes with a tuft of creamy hairs at the tip.

The species distribution ranges along the South African east coast in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal and in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, as well as in Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mozambique and further north in tropical Africa.

The habitat is the fringes of evergreen forests or forest underbrush. The species is not considered to be threatened in its habitat early in the twenty first century.

While the plant is poisonous, the fruits are eaten by birds. The bark is used to make rope (Coates Palgrave, 2002; http://redlist.sanbi.org).