Warty Star Apple

verrucosa: warty

Evergreen shrub or small tree. Bark grey to blackish rough and fissured. Leaves spirally arranged, ovate, ovate-oblong to lanceolate, slightly leathery, green and hairless above, densely covered in pale velvet below; margin entire. Flowers in axillary few-flowered clusters or solitary, unisexual, whitish. Fruit up to c. 4.5 × 4 cm broadly ellipsoid to almost round with a warty surface, densely covered in rusty hairs when young, orange to black and almost hairless when ripe; persistent calyx small and inconspicuous.

Local. In Southern Africa only known North of the Beira-Dondo area. More common further north.

Mozambique and Tanzania