Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, shrubs, or trees.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Usually opposite, sometimes whorled, rarely alternate. Margins usually entire. Sessile, subsessile, or petiolate. Stipules minute or absent.

Flowers: Flowers solitary or in axillary dichasia or terminal racemes, panicles, or dichasial cymes. Flowers bisexual (perfect), sometimes cleistogamous flowers also present, actinomorphic or sometimes zygomorphic. Calyx teeth (3)4, 6, 8(–16), valvate, appearing as lobes on the floral tube, often alternating with external appendages at the sinuses. Petals as many as and alternate with the sepals, distinct, attached at summit of or within floral tube, crumbled in bud, sometimes absent. Stamens usually twice as many as sepals, but sometimes fewer or numerous, inserted at various levels on the floral tube; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2–4(–6)-carpellate, with as many cells, at least at base, rarely 1-celled, placentation axile, rarely parietal when 1-celled; ovules 2 to numerous, anatropous, ascending; style 1, sometimes plants heterostylous; stigma usually capitate.

Fruit: Capsules dry; dehiscent or indehiscent. Seeds (1) to numerous per cell; ± winged; endosperm absent or very scanty.

Ploidy:

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