Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Lianas, rarely shrubs or trees.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Blades chartaceous to more or less coriaceous. Petiolate.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences terminal, terminal on axillary (lateral) shoots, or axillary, solitary or composed of 2-10 heads, umbel-like, racemose or cymose or terminal; flowers mostly completely to basally fused when clustered in heads, sometimes in multiflorous compound dichasia or rarely single, sessile or sometimes pedicellate. Flowers insect-pollinated, polygamous (hermaphrodite and functionally unisexual) or dioecious, often heterostylous. Calyx 4–5 lobed with open aestivation, the lobes usually small, rudimentary, or absent, occasionally 1 or more enlarged and brightly colored. Corolla tubes shorter than corolla lobes, rarely as long as or longer than corolla lobes; (3)4-5(8-10)-lobed, the lobes valvate, imbricate, or convolute; nectary disk usually present. Stamens as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes; filaments inserted in corolla throat, linear, glabrous, white; anthers partly exserted, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits; disk annular, persistent in fruit. Ovary inferior, 2(-5)-carpellate, bilocular with longitudinal false dissepiment separating the ovules, locule biovular, ovaries of all flowers of a head basally to completely fused; style 1 or as many as carpels, terete (cylindrical), terminal, slender; stigmas bilobate, exserted, dry or occasionally wet.

Fruit: Fruits fused into syncarps or simple drupes. Seeds globose or semi-globose; with well-developed oily endosperm; or endosperm occasionally scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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