Trees or low shrubs with silky hairy young shoots. Leaves often leathery, alternate, terete or narrow, entire, acute or acuminate. Flowers bisexual, sessile, showy, variously colored, arranged in bottlebrush-like, pseudoterminal spikes and axis of inflorescence grows beyond to produce leafy shoot, bracts absent or membranous and fugacious, rarely foliaceous and persistent. Calyx tube campanulate or urceolate, adnate below to the ovary, limb 5-lobed, lobes imbricate, ±scarious, deciduous. Petals 5, orbicular, longer than sepals, patent, green, yellow, white, pink or red. Stamens numerous, conspicuous, filaments much longer than petals, showy, free or basally shortly united into a ring. Ovary 3- or 4-loculed, ovules numerous in each locule; style filiform, stigma small. Fruit a globose to urn-shaped, woody capsule, often forming dense spikes. Seeds fine, brown.