Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Evergreen shrubs or trees, usually pubescent with 3–celled, thick–walled hairs, occasionally also glandular pubescent, or occasionally glabrous.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple or compound (pinnate or bipinnate). Alternate, rarely subopposite or nearly whorled. Margins entire to toothed, sometimes spiny. Petiolate (rarely sessile). Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in solitary or 2 in the leaf axils, arranged in racemes, umbels, or cone-like inflorescences or in heads subtended by an involucre similar to that in asteraceae. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or rarely unisexual (and then plants monoecious or dioecious), protandrous, actinomorphic or zygomorphic; pollinated by insects, birds, mammals, or marsupials. Calyx of 4 sepals; sepals usually petaloid, distinct or connate to form an unevenly cleft tube or sometimes 3 sepals connate and the fourth distinct. Corolla vestigial, represented only by an annular or horseshoe–shaped, usually 4-lobed nectary disk or by (2–)4 distinct or connate scales or glands alternate with the sepals, or completely absent. Stamens 4, adnate to base of sepals or inserted on calyx tube; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, occasionally 1 or more reduced and monothecal or represented by a staminode, the connective usually prolonged as a conspicuous terminal appendage. Ovary superior to partly inferior 1-carpellate, often on a stipe, open to varying degrees, placentation along the margin of the carpel; ovules 1 to numerous, hemitropous, amphitropous, or occasionally orthotropous or anatropous; style 1, sometimes somewhat modified to assist in pollen presentation; stigma terminal or lateral.

Fruit: Follicles; nuts; achenes; or drupes. Seeds often winged; endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

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