Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herbs, small shrubs, occasionally annual herbs or lianas.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Surfaces often with scattered chalk glands on or depressed in the surface, these exuding water and salts, often also with raised mucilage glands in the axils. Margins entire. Petioles present or absent. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in panicles, cymose heads, racemes, or spikes, bracteate. Flowers bisexual (perfect), often heterostylous, actinomorphic. Calyx 5-lobed, the tube often conspicuously 5–ribbed or 10–ribbed with membranous intervals, the lobes dry and membranous or scarious, often showy and petaloid. Corolla of 5 petals, distinct or connate at base or into a long tube, often persistent, convolute in bud. Stamens 5, opposite the petals; filaments distinct or adnate to corolla tube; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 5-carpellate, 1-celled, placentation basal; ovule 1, anatropous, on an elongate funiculus; styles 5, essentially distinct, or 1 and apically lobed.

Fruit: Fruit an achene; sometimes a circumscissile capsules or apically dehiscent by valves; partly or completely enclosed by the persistent calyx. Seeds 1 per fruit; sometimes with abundant firm; starchy endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: