Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs or in Hawaiian species shrubs or subshrubs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, opposite, or basal. Blades usually palmately cleft or lobed. Margins sometimes pinnately lobed or (in Hawai'i) not lobed, but merely apically toothed or serrate. Usually petiolate. Stipules usually present.

Flowers: Flowers in cymose, often umbellate inflorescences, axillary or terminal; peduncles and slender. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic or rarely zygomorphic, solitary or clustered; pedicels slender, subtended by narrow bracts. Calyx of 5 sepals, often mucronate or awn–tipped, distinct or sometimes connate at base, rarely forming a tube. Stamens (5)10; filaments ± connate at base, those alternate with the petals longer than others and with basal glands; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior or nearly so, 5-celled, carpels connate around a central column to form a compound ovary with as many cells, fertile portion a lobed ring at base of stylar column, placentation axile; ovules 2 per cell, anatropous to campylotropous, usually pendulous; styles 3–5, slender and beak-like, sometimes narrowed below apex; stigmas slender and dry, rarely capitate.

Fruit: Septicidal and elastically dehiscent capsules separating into as many segments as carpels; a portion of the style splitting off from remainder of stylar column and forming an awn that recurves upward from the persistent central column; usually remaining attached to apex; sometimes the awn also becomes spirally coiled; awn usually hygroscopic. Seeds 1–2 per segment; smooth or reticulate; endosperm usually scanty or absent; rarely copious and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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