Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Terrestrial, often large perennial herbs.

Stems: Stems procumbent, usually coarse, up to 6 m long, spreading vegetatively by thick rhizomes.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, basal, or clustered at the ends of the stems. Blades giant, cordate, reniform, very broadly ovate, or orbicular. Blades often rugose. Margins often lobed or crenate, rarely entire. Palmately veined. Long-petiolate, sometimes peltate. Stipules absent but with large axillary scales often called stipules, these simple to divided.

Flowers: Flowers in spikes, racemes, or sometimes panicles, usually 1 per stem, each one without subtending bracts. Flowers very small, bisexual (perfect) or unisexual (and then plants monoecious or dioecious), when plants monoecious, staminate flowers usually above pistillate ones, sometimes with bisexual (perfect) flowers in between. Calyx lobes 2(3), very small, sometimes only rudimentary, equal or unequal, valvate, often cuspidate, ± caducous. Corolla of (0)2 petals; petals always absent in pistillate flowers, oblong to spatulate, slightly longer than sepals, glabrous to pilose, usually caducous. Stamens 1–2; filaments very short; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior, urceolate to depressed–ovoid, 2-carpellate, 1-celled; ovule 1, pendulous from ovary apex, anatropous; styles 2, terminal, subulate to filiform; stigmas papillate.

Fruit: Fruit drupaceous or nut-like; coriaceous to ± fleshy and juicy; globose; 3–angled. Seeds small; embryo embedded in copious oily endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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