Sundari Tree

The hard, strong timber is used for ships’ masts when sufficiently straight and long, as well as for house posts, joists, wheel hubs, and boat ribs.

Evergreen trees, up to 10(-15) m tall; bark gray-brown. Young branchlets white scurfy scaly. Stipules lanceolate, caducous; petiole 1-2 cm; leaf blade oblong-lanceolate, elliptic, or ovate, 10-20 × 5-10 cm, leathery, abaxially densely silver-white scurfy scaly, adaxially glabrous or nearly so, base obtuse, apex acute or obtuse. Inflorescence paniculate, axillary, ca. 8 cm, densely stellate hairy or with scales. Calyx red-brown, campanulate, 4-6 mm, both surfaces stellate hairy, lobes triangular,
ca. 2 mm. Male flowers: disk thin, papillate. Androgynophore short and glabrous. Anthers 4 or 5, in 1 ring. Female flowers: carpels 4 or 5. Stigmas as many as carpels, short and curved downward. Fruit nutlike, woody, drying yellow-brown, nearly ellipsoid, ca. 6 × 3.5 cm, keeled on back, glabrous. Seeds ovoid, ca. 2 cm. Fl. summer.

Mangrove forests. Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Taiwan [Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Vietnam; E Africa, Australia].