Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Herbs, shrubs, or trees, sometimes sprawling or climbing, sometimes spiny.

Stems: Wood usually soft, brittle, with anomalous secondary growth, nodes often enlarged.

Roots: Sometimes enlarged and fleshy–fibrous.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Usually opposite, subopposite, rarely alternate or whorled. Leaves evergreen or rarely dry season deciduous. Margins entire to sinuate. Petioles usually present, well defined. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in axillary or terminal cymes, these sometimes paniculate or rarely appearing racemose, or rarely reduced to solitary flowers, often bracteate, ultimate clusters or individual flowers often involucrate. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or unisexual (and then plants dioecious, monoecious, or incompletely dioecious). Calyx usually corolloid, with an elongate tube, often constricted above ovary, the limb actinomorphic or slightly irregular, deciduous or persistent, often enlarged and showy, (3–)5(–8)-lobed, the lobes valvate or plicate in bud. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens 1 to numerous, basal; filaments distinct or connate at base; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, dorsifixed, usually orbicular or even wider than long. Ovary superior, 1-celled; ovule 1, basal, usually campylotropous; style 1; stigma capitate or variously divided.

Fruit: Fruit an achene or nut; often enclosed by the lower portion of the calyx; its limb either caducous or persistent as a tube or beak or as inflexed lobes; the collective structure referred to as an anthocarp; the anthocarp firm or indurate; rarely fleshy. Seeds 1 per fruit; closely enclosed by the thin ovary wall; embryo straight or curved; surrounded by scanty to copious perisperm; true endosperm absent or present as a cap over the radicle.

Ploidy:

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