Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Herbs, shrubs, climbers, or occasionally trees, usually with alkaloids present.

Stems: Stems with intraxylary phloem, unarmed or armed with prickles or spines, glabrous or pubescent with simple, glandular, dendritic, or stellate hairs.

Roots: Roots simple, rhizomatous or tuberous.

Leaves: Leaves simple or compound, sometimes geminate (in pairs). Alternate. Blades diverse in shape. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in cymose inflorescences, but these greatly modified to appear solitary pedicellate to leafy paniculate, initially terminal but soon appearing lateral by sympodial growth, sometimes extra-axillary. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or unisexual (the plants andromonoecious or rarely dioecious), actinomorphic, occasionally irregular. Calyx lobes (4)5, connate at base. Corolla lobes (4)5, connate at least at base, usually valvate or folded, rarely imbricate in bud. Stamens as many as and alternate with the lobes, inserted on corolla tube, sometimes didynamous, opening by longitudinal slits or apical pores. Ovary superior, 2(4)-celled, placentation axile; ovules few to numerous; style 1; stigma entire or lobed.

Fruit: Fruit an indehiscent; succulent or dryish berry or a capsules. Seeds with embryo curved or spiral; occasionally straight or bent; endosperm usually abundant.

Ploidy:

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