Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Herbs or subshrubs, prostrate and rooting at the nodes to scrambling to erect, glabrous to tomentose.

Stems: Caulescent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Margins entire to dentate or serrate. Palmately-veined. Sheathing petioles. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers few in simple umbels. peduncles axillary, involucre usually of 2 conspicuous bracts. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx teeth obscure or absent. Corolla of 5 petals; petals white to red, orbicular to ovate, without a narrower inflexed apex. Stamens 5, inserted on an epigynous disk. Ovary inferior, 2-celled; ovules 1 per cells, anatropous; styles 2, usually swollen at base into a stylopodium. Styles short, the stylopodium absent, carpophore entire.

Fruit: Fruit constricted at the commissure and flattened laterally; mericarps flattened laterally; glabrous or glabrate; ribs 7–9; filiform; connected by conspicuous reticulations; an oil–bearing layer beneath the outer pericarp; but companion canals and vittae are usually absent. Seeds 1 per mericarp; embryo small; endosperm cartilaginous. seed face plane.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: