Product Description
Synonym(s)
Cordia abyssinica
Cordia holstii
Cordia ubanghensis .
Botanic description
Cordia africana is a small to medium-sized evergreen tree, 4-15 (30) m high, heavily branched with a spreading, umbrella-shaped or rounded crown. Bole typically curved or crooked. Bark greyish-brown to dark brown, smooth in young trees, but soon becoming rough and longitudinally fissured with age; young branchlets with sparse long hairs. Leaves alternate, simple, ovate to subcircular, 7.5-17.5 (max. 30) cm long, 3.5-10.2 (max. 30) cm broad; thinly leathery; dark green above, paler green and velvety below; with prominent parallel tertiary net-nerves (about 7 pairs of lateral nerves); apex broadly tapering or rounded; base rounded to shallowly lobed; margin entire; petiole slender, 2.5-7.6 cm long. Buds oval, stalkless, pleated open into flowers that are bisexual, white, sweet scented, shortly pedicelate or subsessile, massed in compact panicles covering the crown, with a white mass of attractive flowers; calyx less than 1 cm long, strongly ribbed, back of lobes covered with short, soft, brown hairs; corolla lobes crinkled, white, long-exerted, funnel-shaped, about 2.5 cm long; cymes many flowered. Fruit a drupe, smooth, spherical, oval tipped, fleshy, 1.3-1.5 cm long; green when young, yellow to orange when mature; with a sweet, mucilaginous pulp and short remains of the calyx at the base; contains 2-4 seeds, which lack endosperm. The generic name honours a 16th century German botanist, Valerius Cordus, and ‘africana’ simply means ‘from Africa’. The specific epithet of the synonym, ‘abyssinica’, implies that the plant was described from Ethiopia.