Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees, shrubs, lianas, or annual or perennial herbs, glabrous or pubescent, also often with resinous yellow or other brightly colored sap in secretory canals or cavities in most or all of the tissues, often making the tissue glandular punctate.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite, sometimes alternate or whorled. Margins usually entire. Petiolate (usually. Stipules nearly always absent.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal or axillary, cymose or thyrsoid to racemose inflorescences, occasionally solitary, often with sepaloid bracteoles present beneath the sepals. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or unisexual (and then plants polygamomonoecious or dioecious), actinomorphic. Calyx of 2–10 sepals; sepals often indistinguishable from the subtending bracteoles. Corolla of (2)3–6(–14), distinct or connate at the base, irnbricate or convolute in bud. Stamens (3,5)–numerous, usually in 2–5 clusters, when 5 then opposite and sometimes adnate to the petals, often some sterile stamens or sterile clusters present; anthers dithecal, usually opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, (1–)3–5(–16)-carpellate, with as many cells, sometimes 1-celled when intruded placentas do not meet in the center, placentation axile or occasionally parietal, the placentas intruded, rarely basal; ovules (1)2 to numerous per cell, anatropous or hemitropous; styles as many as the cells, distinct, connate toward the basen or connate into a single style with a lobed or peltate stigma.

Fruit: Fruit usually a septicidal capsules; sometimes a berry or drupaceous. Seeds sometimes with an aril; endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: