Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs, small trees, lianas, or sometimes annual or perennial herbs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple or rarely compound (pinnate). Opposite or in a basal rosette. Margins entire to pinnatifid. Petiolate, often sheathing. Stipules usually absent, but if present, usually small and adnate to petioles, or sometimes modified into extrafloral nectaries.

Flowers: Flowers actinomorphic or zygomorphic, in basically cymose inflorescences, often with pairs of flowers that are sometimes connate toward the base of the ovaries. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or unisexual with usually both sexes in each inflorescence. Calyx (4)5-lobed, the lobes usually small. Corolla often 2-lipped, (4)5-lobed, the tube variable from very short to long and narrow. Stamens usually as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, occasionally only 2 or 4; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior to partly inferior, 2–5(–8)-carpellate, usually with as many cells, placentation axile, sometimes only 1 cell fertile, the others empty or ± strongly reduced; ovules 1 to numerous per cell, pendulous, anatropous; style 1; stigma capitate or lobed.

Fruit: Capsules dry; sometimes winged and usually with the accrescent plumose calyx. Seeds 1 per fruit; endosperm absent or endosperm oily and fleshy.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: