An often spindly, unbranched, sometimes decumbent, glabrous shrub or small tree to 4.5 m high; plants dioecious.Bark smooth, mottled, light grey, flaking.Twigs often pinkish-grey.Young lead shoots robust, angular.Lateral leafy shoots up to 12 cm long, sometimes with flowers at the base.Short shoots either giving rise to secondary leafy shoots and lead shoots (in female plants) or else directly floriferous (in male plants).Scale leaves and their stipules 1.5–2 × 0.5–1 mm, narrowly lanceolate, light brown with fimbriate hyaline margins.Foliage leaves distichous; petioles 1.5 mm long; blades up to 4.5 × 3 cm, elliptic, obovate or ± suborbicular, obtuse to rounded at the apex, cuneate to rounded at the base, chartaceous, midrib commonly not running to the apex, bluish-green to yellowish-green above, paler beneath; lateral nerves in 5–7 pairs, not prominent above, scarcely so beneath.Stipules 0.5 mm long, linear-lanceolate, soon falling.Male flowers fragrant, usually in dense fascicles on older leafless twigs; bracts 1 mm long, broadly ovate, erose, chestnut-brown; pedicels 3–4(7) mm long, slender; sepals 6, c. 1 × 0.5–1 mm, obovate-suborbicular, the outer convex, the inner ± flat, fimbriate, brown at the apex, otherwise yellowish; disk 1 mm in diameter, annular, ± entire, thin, flat; stamens (5)6, 2 mm long, filaments free or ± so, anthers 0.3 mm long.Female flowers either in few-flowered fascicles on the older twigs or else solitary in the lowest axils of the leafy shoots; bracts ± as in the male; pedicels 0.5–1 cm long, extending to 2–4 cm long in fruit, slender; outer sepals smaller than inner, otherwise sepals ± as in the male; disk 1.5 mm in diameter, collar-like, shallowly hexagonal; ovary 1.5 mm in diameter, ± sessile, subglobose, smooth; styles 3, 2 mm long, united at the base, ± erect at first, later spreading, slender, bifid, the stigmas filiform, minutely papillose.Fruit 4–5 × 8–10 mm, pendent, rounded, depressed-trigonous, shallowly reticulate-venose, crustaceous, pale green ripening to yellowish.Seeds 2.5–3 × 2–2.5 mm, ovoid, faintly lineate, pale brown to whitish, with a deep, dark, hilar excavation.
