From the Greek Aglaia, one of the Graces who presided over the Olympic Games; beauty, lustre.

Aglaia odorata Lour.

Trees, dioecious; indumentum of stellate hairs and or stellate or peltate scales. Leaves usually (always in Australia) imparipinnate. Inflorescences axillary panicles, male larger than female. Flowers unisexual, male smaller than female, similar in structure but male lacks viable ovules and female lacks pollen. Petals usually 3 or 5, rarely 2, 4 or 6, free; aestivation imbricate or quincuncial; staminal tube cup-shaped, subglobose or obovoid, with margin entire or lobed, usually without hairs or scales, rarely with stellate hairs on inside of tube (A. cooperae, A. euryanthera); anthers 3, 5 or 6, inserted inside staminal tube, sessile, rarely with simple hairs on margins (A. euryanthera), included or protruding through aperture of staminal tube. Disc absent. Ovary with (1–) 2 or 3 locules, each with 1 or 2 ovules; style absent; stigma sessile, either ovoid with 2 or 3 apical lobes or depressed-globose. Fruit either a dehiscent loculicidal capsule with 3 locules or indehiscent with 1 or 2 locules; pericarp fibrous. Seeds plano-convex, 0 or 1 per locule; aril usually almost or completely surrounding seed, rarely vestigial.

A genus of 120 species in Indomalesia, Australasia and the Western Pacific. Twelve species occur predominantly near the coast in N and NE tropical Australia, mainly in Cape York, where 4 or 5 species are endemic, but also in northern Western Australia, Northern Territory and Queensland as far south as Gympie.

The fruits or arillate seeds are eaten, and the cleaned seeds dispersed, by birds such as Cassowaries, Pied Imperial Pigeons, Victoria’s Riflebirds, Spotted Catbirds, and Wompoo Fruit-doves. King Parrots feed on fruits of A. ferruginea, but they are likely to destroy the seeds.

The genus Aglaia is the source of a unique group of natural products featuring a cyclopenta[b]-tetrahydrobenzofuran skeleton. Most of these compounds have potent insecticidal properties, antifungal, antiviral, antibacterial or antihelmintic bioactivity. Several of them exhibit pronounced cytotoxic activity against a range of human cancers (see S.S. Ebada et al., in A.D. Kinghorn et al. (eds), Progress in the Chemistry of Organic Natural Products: 94 (2011).

Amoora is now included in Aglaia. Dehiscence of the fruit is the only constant distinguishing feature between the two genera (dehiscent in Amoora and indehiscent in Aglaia), but since this is not consistently correlated with any other more frequently available character, identification of the separate genera, if they were maintained, would often not be possible. However, molecular investigation of the genus thus circumscribed suggests that it is paraphyletic and that it encompasses 3 monophyletic lineages, sect. Amoora, sect. Neoaglaia and sect. Aglaia (A.N. Muellner et al. 2005).

The small or tiny flowers are complex in structure and highly perfumed, especially in the male. All species have a fleshy aril. This usually completely surrounds the seed, but in A. elaeagnoidea in Australia it is vestigial and the pericarp is fleshy.

C.M. Pannell, Aglaia, Flora of Australia 26: 33–42 (2013).