Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees, shrubs, subshrubs, or vines with very thick or fine fibrous roots, perennial, sometimes monocarpic.

Stems: Stems slender to massive, strongly fibrous, solitary, tufted or soboliferous, rarely branched, ringed with leaf scars and smooth waxy internodes, or rough with persistent petiole base fibers, or fissured.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple or compound. Spirally arranged. Blades plicate in bud, linear–elliptic to orbicular. Surfaces glabrous or lepidote, pubescent, prickly or waxy at least during development. Margins crenate, serrate, or entire, or pinnately or rarely bipinnately divided, or palmately or costapalmately divided, leaflets and segments induplicate or reduplicate in bud, linear–elliptic, falcate, sigmoid or cuneiform. Veins pinnate or palmate. Petioles sheathing, tubular armed or unarmed, deciduous or persistent. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal or axillary, infrafoliar, interfoliar, or suprafoliar, bracteate, sessile or pedunculate panicles, spikes, or heads, individually solitary or clustered in triads of 2 staminate on either side of 1 pistillate flower or rarely with paired pistillate flowers, or in clusters of flowers in lines with 1 to several pistillate flowers and several to numerous staminate flowers; perianth biseriate or in thrinax sw. and allies a single, usually irregularly 6-lobed series, persistent in fruit or petals deciduous and only calyx persistent in fruit. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or unisexual (and then plants monoecious, dioecious, or polygamous), actinomorphic. Calyx of 3 sepals (typically), imbricate or rarely valvate, distinct or connate. Corolla usually of 3 petals; petals, imbricate or valvate, often shortly connate, rarely adnate to sepals. Stamens 3–200 or more, pistillate flowers usually with staminodes; filaments distinct, connate, or adnate to petals, sometimes with nectaries at base; anthers dithecal or rarely monothecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 3(–10)-carpellate, 1-carpellate in Thrinax and allies, carpels distinct or variously connate, septal nectaries sometimes present; ovules usually 1 per carpel, anatropous; styles as many as carpels, distinct or connate, or short and thick so that stigmas appear to be sessile.

Fruit: Fruit small to very large; dry and fibrous or with fleshy mesocarp and papery to bony endocarp. Seeds 1–3 or rarely more; with solid; hollow; perforated; homogeneous or ruminate mealy endosperm and a subapical; lateral; or basal embryo.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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