Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Terrestrial herbs, shrubs, or small trees; sometimes forming mats or cushions.

Stems: Caulescent or acaulescent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple or compound (decompound). Alternate, basal, or occasionally opposite. Margins entire to usually much dissected. Sheathing petioles. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in lax, compound or simple umbels, or umbels capitate. umbels sometimes subtended by bracts to form an involucre, umbellets often subtended by bractlets to form an involucel. Flowers epigynous, small, bisexual (perfect) or staminate. Calyx tube wholly adnate to ovary, the 5 distinct lobes (teeth) usually minute or absent, sometimes conspicuous and persistent. Corolla of 5 petals, with or without a narrower inflexed apex. Stamens 5, inserted on an epigynous disk. Ovary inferior, 2-celled; ovules 1 per cells, anatropous; styles 2, usually swollen at base into a stylopodium.

Fruit: Fruit consisting of 2 mericarps connate by their faces (commissure); variously compressed or terete (cylindrical); each mericarp with 5 primary (and sometimes also secondary) ribs; the ribs filiform to winged; or ribs obscure and fruit surface variously appendaged; mericarps separating at maturity and usually suspended from a persistent axis (carpophore); or carpophore absent; vittae (oil tubes) usually present in pericarp. Seeds 1 per mericarp; embryo small; endosperm cartilaginous.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: