Tennantia

Tennantia is a monotypic genus of flowering plants belonging to the family Rubiaceae. It only contains one known species, Tennantia sennii (Chiov.) Verdc. & Bridson

Description
It is a shrub, 1 - 3 m tall, with whitish stems that are puberulous when young. The leaf-blades are elliptic to narrowly obovate in shape. They are 1 - 6.5 cm long and 0.5 - 2.9 cm wide. With rounded and sometimes minutely apiculate at the apex, glabrous or puberulous; stipules are 1 - 3 mm long. Calyx with limb-tube about 1.2 mm long, with lobes about 0.8 mm long. The corolla is white or tinged pink; with the perianth tube 1.5 - 2 mm long; the lobes are about 5 mm long. The fruit (or seed capsule) is black, 5 - 6 mm in diameter and glabrous. The seeds are about 4 mm long.

Its native range is from Somalia to Kenya and Tanzania in eastern Tropical Africa.

The genus name of Tennantia is in honour of James Robert Tennant (b. 1928), a British botanist working at Kew Gardens. The Latin specific epithet of sennii honors Lorenzo Senni (1879 - 1954), an Italian botanist who collected the type specimen. Both the genus and the species were first described and published in Kew Bull. Vol.36 on page 511 in 1981.