Trees or shrubs, mostly armed with a pair of stipular spines, one usually long and straight and the other short recurved. Leaves mostly distichous to subdistichous, alternate 3(-5)-nerved, usually leathery and oblique at the base, entire serrate or serrulate. Flowers in axillary cymes, 5-merous, regular, greenish yellow, mostly bisexual. Calyx 5-fid, saucer-shaped, lobes keeled. Petals 5, rarely absent, cucullate, disc pitted or flat 5-10 lobed, mostly lining the calyx tube. Stamens enclosed within the petals. Ovary immersed in disc, 2-4 celled, style 2(-3)-partite, stigma papillose, small. Fruit drupaceous, fleshy, succulent, globose-oblong, pyrenes 1-4, rugose or tuberculate,
1-seed in each stone. Seed plano-convex, mostly with very scanty endosperm.
A genus of about 100 species distributed mostly in tropical America, Africa, Mediteranean region, Indo-Malaya, Australia, Pakistan and India. Represented by 6 species in Pakistan.
Excluded species
1. Ziziphus glabrata Heyne ex Roth, Nov. Sp. 159. 1821.
2. Ziziphus horrida Roth, l.c. 150.
Hasnain & Rahman (Pl. Kar. Sind. 19. 1957) have reported Z. glabrata Heyne ex Roth and Z. horrida Roth from Sind vide Cooke. However we have not come across any specimen belonging to these species.
