Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, shrubs, lianas, or sometimes trees.

Stems: Stems erect, prostrate, twining, or scandent, often with swollen nodes, striate, grooved, or prickly.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, sometimes opposite or whorled. Base sometimes articulate. Margins usually entire, sometimes pinnately or palmately lobed. Petiolate or subsessile. Stipules present, usually well–developed and connate into a dry and membranous or hyaline, often fringed or 2–lobed sheath (ocrea) around the stem, or sometimes very reduced or absent.

Flowers: Flowers in cymes, these arranged in open or compact, racemose, or paniculate inflorescences with bracts and bracteoles or small involucrate fascicles, each flower often subtended by a persistent ocrea and often with a distinctly stipitate base above the articulation to the pedicel. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or sometimes unisexual (and then plants usually dioecious or monoecious), actinomorphic. Tepals 2–6, usually in 2 similar or slightly dissimilar whorls of 3, sometimes 5 and in a single whorl, green and herbaceous to petaloid, connate at base into a minute floral tube, often persistent and sometimes accrescent in fruit. Stamens 2–9, most often 6 in 2 whorls of 3, 1 to several inserted opposite each tepal, sometimes opposite only the outer whorl; filaments distinct or basally connate, often of 2 lengths, those of inner series often dilated; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, (2)3(4)-carpellate, 1-celled, sometimes with vestigial partitions at base, placentation basal or free-central; ovule 1, orthotropous or rarely anatropous; styles as many as carpels, distinct or basally connate; stigmas dry.

Fruit: Fruit an achene or small nut; trigonous or sometimes lenticular; sometimes partially to completely enclosed by the persistent; sometimes accrescent tepals. Seeds with well-developed; starchy and oily; usually hard endosperm.

Ploidy:

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