Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herbs, shrubs, or sometimes small trees or lianas, usually glabrous and often somewhat succulent.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Margins entire. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent or vestigial.

Flowers: Flowers in racemes, spikes, irregular panicles, or cymes, sometimes solitary in the upper leaf axils. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or rarely unisexual (and then plants dioecious), actinomorphic or rarely zygomorphic. Calyx of 4–5(–10) sepals; sepals distinct or sometimes slightly connate, dry and inconspicuous or sometimes petaloid. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens 4 to numerous, the number variable within a species or even a single inflorescence, often in 2 alternating whorls and twice as many as sepals; filaments distinct or slightly connate; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 1–16-carpellate, the carpels distinct or connate, placentation basal; ovule 1 per carpel, campylotropous; styles usually as many as carpels or absent; stigma capitate or ± penicillate.

Fruit: Berries; capsules; drupe; achene; or samara; the carpels often separating at maturity. Seeds 1 per carpel; embryo curved around a mealy or starchy perisperm; true endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: