Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Lianas or occasionally small, fleshy trees or herbs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Margins ± palmately lobed, or blades occasionally palmately or pinnately compound, and sometimes also peltate scales, usually with leaf–opposed tendrils. Veins palmate, usually with specialized, multicellular, stalked "pearl glands". Petiolate. Stipules present, usually deciduous.

Flowers: Flowers in leaf–opposed, terminal, or rarely axillary, cymose paniculate inflorescences. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or unisexual, actinomorphic. Calyx (3)4–5(–7)-lobed or (3)4–5(–7)-toothed, sometimes the lobes or teeth reduced and the Calyx a truncate collar. Corolla of (3)4–5(–7) petals; petals distinct or rarely basally connate, sometimes (especially in Vitis) apically coherent and deciduous as a calyprtra. Stamens as many as and opposite the petals; filaments distinct, slender; anthers dithecal, introrse, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, sometimes somewhat sunken into nectary disk, 2-carpellate, 2-celled, sometimes incompletely so; ovules 2 per cell, ascending from carpel margin near base, anatropous, sometimes with a placental obturator; style 1; stigma discoid or capitate.

Fruit: Berries; sometimes somewhat dry. Seeds with a conspicuous abaxial chalazal knot and 2 deep adaxial grooves; 1 on each side of the raphe; endosperm copious; usually 3–lobed; ruminate; oily; and proteinaceous.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: