Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, shrubs, or sometimes small trees or lianas.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Margins entire or toothed, lobed, or sometimes dissected. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules present.

Flowers: Flowers in solitary and axillary or arranged in racemes, panicles, or heads, bracteolate. Flowers bisexual (perfect), rarely some or all unisexual, occasionally some cleistogamous, actinomorphic, slightly irregular, or zygomorphic. Calyx of 5 sepals, distinct or slightly connate, imbricate, usually persistent. Corolla of 5 petals, imbricate or convolute, the lowermost petal usually prolonged into a nectariferous spur in irregular flowers. Stamens 5; filaments very short, distinct or connate; anthers usually coherent, forming a ring around the ovary, usually the 2 anterior ones in Viola or all of them in woody genera with a glandular or spur nectary on the back, the connective usually prolonged into a membranous appendage, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, (2)3(–5)-carpellate, 1-celled, placentation parietal; ovules 1 to numerous, anatropous; style 1, often enlarged or modified toward apex; stigma simple or lobed.

Fruit: Loculicidal capsules or fleshy. Seeds with fleshy; oily endosperm; usually arillate.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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