Coprosma parviflora

Coprosma parviflora is a slender, divaricately branched evergreen shrub in the Rubiaceae endemic to New Zealand, occurring in lowland to montane forest, scrub and forest margins on the North, South and Stewart Islands. Plants grow 1 to 4 metres tall with a tangled, interlacing, often nearly horizontal branching pattern characteristic of many native New Zealand divaricate shrubs; the slender wiry twigs are pale brown and finely pubescent when young. The opposite, small, fascicled leaves are obovate to narrowly elliptic, 4 to 12 millimetres long, with a leathery texture, glabrous surfaces, an entire margin and small persistent interpetiolar stipules united into a sheath at the node — a diagnostic feature of the genus. The plants are dioecious; small, inconspicuous, four-merous greenish flowers without showy petals are borne singly or in small clusters in the leaf axils, the male flowers with exserted stamens and the female with two long feathery stigmas. The fruit is a small fleshy drupe 4 to 6 millimetres long that ripens white, blue-white or pale lilac and contains two stony pyrenes.