Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Rather succulent herbs or shrubs, sometimes scandent or epiphytic.

Stems:

Roots: Usually thick rhizomes or tubers, but some short-lived weedy species from fibrous roots, or some scandent species with aerial roots.

Leaves: Leaves simple or rarely compound. Alternate and 2-ranked in caulescent species, many-ranked in acaulescent ones. Blades in line with, oblique, or transverse to the petiole. Surfaces variously pubescent, lepidote or glabrous. Margins entire to doubly serrate or lobed. Usually petiolate. Stipules minute to large, often persistent.

Flowers: Flowers in axillary, cymose or dichotomous, or rarely racemose or paniculate inflorescences. Flowers unisexual, often somewhat irregular. Each flower subtended by showy, colored bracts. Perianth parts usually distinct, rarely inconsistently connate, staminate flowers usually consisting of 4 parts in 2 opposite pairs, the lower apparently represent the calyx, the upper representing the corolla, occasionally only 2 parts or more than 4; pistillate flowers usually consisting of a single imbricate series of 5 perianth parts or sometimes 2–4(6–8). Stamens numerous; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits or occasionally by terminal pores, the connective usually protruded above the pollen sacs or sometimes well separating them. Ovary inferior or partly so in Hillebrandia, (2)3(6)-carpellate, with as many cells or rarely the placental partitions not complete and thus 1-celled, placentation axile or, when ovary 1-celled, parietal; ovules numerous, anatropous; styles distinct or sometimes connate, usually 2-lobed; stigmas usually twisted.

Fruit: Loculicidal capsules; usually with (1–)3(–6) prominent unequal or equal wings; sometimes fleshy and indehiscent. Seeds numerous and small; endosperm essentially absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: