Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs or small trees with watery sap, usually with stinging hairs on young parts.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Margins entire to lobed. Palmately 3–5-veined or pinnately veined. Petiolate. Stipules distinct or connate and intrapetiolar.

Flowers: Flowers in cymose clusters arranged in dichotomously, trichotomously, or irregularly branched paniculate inflorescences arising from the leaf axils or at older nodes, bracts small or absent. Flowers unisexual (and the plants dioecious or monoecious). Calyx of staminate flowers 4–5-lobed, the lobes ovate, slightly imbricate, depressed in bud; Calyx of pistillate flowers 3–5– lobed, the lobes subequal or outer ones smaller than inner ones, becoming fleshy in fruit. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens in staminate flower 4–5; filaments incurved in bud, elastically reflexed when pollen is shed; anthers dithecal, reniform, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior (pistillate flowers), straight or slightly oblique, psuedomonomerous, 1-celled; ovule 1, placentation basal; style 1; stigma subsessile, capitate–penicillate, persistent. Staminate flower pistillode globose to cup-like, ovary vestigial and sterile.

Fruit: Achenes straight or oblique; compressed to subglobose; enclosed by the fleshy; enlarged; often brightly colored calyx; or berry-like and stipitate. Seeds 1 per achene.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: