Garrar is a small deciduous tree. The bark is dark brown, almost black, often with a reddish tinge, rough, peeling in rectangular woody scales. Leaves are alternate, quite entire, leathery, circular, broadly obovate or elliptic, 1.5-3 inches long. The leaf stalk is 6 mm long. Flowers are yellowish-green, in small silky, hairy clusters in leaf axils.

Sepals are ovate-lance shaped. Petals are as many as the sepals; minute narrow. Stamens are 5, filaments united in a column in the center of the disk and bearing a pyramidal or 3-lobed pistillode. The ovary is hairless, styles 3, bifid. The capsule is woody, stalkless, spherical, obscurely 3 rarely 4-lobed, 1.5-2 cm in diameter, dark-brown, shining.

The bark is used to poison fish, and the outer crust of the capsule and the leaves and roots are also said to be exceedingly poisonous. Flowering: October-December.