Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs with viscid sap.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Surfaces glabrous to pubescent. Margins crenate. Palmately 3-veined, pinnately veined above. Petiolate. Stipules large and conspicuous, connate, intrapetiolar, caducous.

Flowers: Flowers in dense, globose, paniculate, pedunculate clusters, bracts small. Flowers unisexual (and the plants dioecious). Calyx of staminate flowers 5-lobed, the lobes thin, ca. ⅓–⅔ as long as Calyx, weakly imbricate, depressed in bud, slightly mucronate just below apex; pistillate flowers with Calyx deeply 4-lobed, the lobes imbricate, thickened and hooded at apex. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens in staminate flowers 5; filaments incurved in bud, elastically reflexed when pollen is shed; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior (pistillate flowers), straight, almost as long as calyx, psuedomonomerous, 1-celled; ovule 1, basal; style 1, short; stigma spatulate with 1 face and margins papillate–penicillate. Staminate flower pistillode clavate, ovary vestigial and sterile.

Fruit: Achenes ovoid; compressed; enclosed by the fleshy calyx. Seeds 1 per achene.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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