Shrubs or trees; latex milky. Stems erect, unarmed, glabrous or eglandular-pubescent especially on younger growth. Leaves persistent, opposite, petiolate; stipular colleters intrapetiolar; laminar colleters absent. Inflorescences axillary, compound-cymose, pedunculate. Flowers: calycine colleters present; corolla white, cream, or yellow [pink, pale purple], salverform, aestivation sinistrorse [dextrorse]; corolline corona absent; androecium and gynoecium not united into a gynostegium; stamens inserted near top [middle] of corolla tube; anthers not connivent, not adherent to stigma, connectives not appendiculate or enlarged, locules 4; pollen free, not massed into pollinia, translators absent; nectary annular or absent. Fruits follicular [baccate], solitary or paired, deflexed, yellow, orange, red, or green, ellipsoid or reniform, compressed, smooth, glabrous. Seeds obliquely elliptic, somewhat flattened, not winged, not beaked, not comose, arillate. x = 11.

Distribution

Introduced; Florida, Mexico, West Indies, Central America, South America, Asia, Africa, Indian Ocean Islands, Pacific Islands.

Discussion

Species ca. 110 (2 in the flora).

Tabernaemontana was established by Linnaeus based on three species, one from tropical Asia and two from the West Indies. The genus was greatly enlarged by A. L. P. P. de Candolle (1844), who recognized more than 60 species from the New World and Old World tropics, but later largely dismembered as taxonomists such as J. Miers (1878) and O. Stapf (1902) began to establish segregate genera, these often restricted to either the Paleotropics or the Neotropics. A revision of Tabernaemontana by M. Pichon (1948b) proposed a broad circumscription of the genus to again include both New World and Old World species, a delimitation largely followed by A. J. M. Leeuwenberg (1991, 1994) in the most recent taxonomic treatments of the group.

A phylogenetic analysis of the tribe Tabernaemontaneae G. Don by A. O. Simões et al. (2010), based on a combination of molecular and morphological characters, found that the species assigned to Tabernaemontana and its segregates form a clade with a deep split into paleotropical and neotropical lineages and that this clade corresponds closely, but not exactly, to the broad circumscription of the genus by A. J. M. Leeuwenberg (1991, 1994). To render Tabernaemontana monophyletic, Simões et al. proposed delimiting the genus to encompass not only the New World and Old World species that had been included in Tabernaemontana by Leeuwenberg but also the neotropical genus Stemmadenia Bentham, a delimitation followed here.

Selected References

None.

Lower Taxa

Tabernaemontana alba, Tabernaemontana divaricata

Key

1	Corolla lobes 7–14 mm; calyx lobes glabrous; seeds 10–50.	Tabernaemontana alba
1	Corolla lobes 15–27 mm; calyx lobes usually ciliate; seeds 2–10.	Tabernaemontana divaricata