Embelia drupacea - Orange Embelia

Orange Embelia is a large rambling branchy shrub, climbing over trees, with a stem about two inches and a half thick. Flowers are scentless, orange-coloured, forming small, oblong, blunt, stalkless, in leaf-axils racemes, equalling the leaf-stalks in length. Rachis is angular, slender; the small lanceshaped, concave, persistent bractlets, very short flower-stalks and calyces are beset with minute, glandular dots. Sepal-cup is very small, deeply divided into four pointed, gland-fringed sepals. Flowers are 4-petalled, much larger than the sepal-cup; petals are linear-oblong, long, blunt, recurved, fringed with hairs. Stamen filaments are 4, diverging, thread-like, smooth, opposite to the petals, about twice their length. Branches are slender, round, long, drooping, smooth, grey; when young they are rigid, sometimes quite leafless, refracted, forming a sort of inoffensive spines on the stem and larger branches. Leaves are scattered irregularly, somewhat drooping, elliptic-lanceshaped or ovate-lanceshaped, pointed at both ends, dark green, shiny above, opaque underneath, with an elevated rib; leathery, 7-13 cm long. Leaf-stalks are slender, round, somewhat twisted, about 2.5 cm long. Orange Embelia is found in S. India, Sri Lanka, W. Malesia.