Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Woody or herbaceous, twining vines, rarely erect shrubs or small trees.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple or rarely compound (trifoliate). Alternate. Margins entire or rarely lobed. Often palmately veined. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers usually in axillary cymes, these sometimes paniculate or racemose, rarely solitary. Flowers small, unisexual (and the plants dioecious), actinomorphic or nearly so. Calyx of (1–)3 or 6(12 to numerous) sepals, usually in 2 whorls, imbricate or valvate, usually distinct. Petals usually as many as sepals and in 2 whorls, sometimes minute or absent, usually distinct. Stamens (3)6(to ca. 40), when few, opposite the petals, distinct or variously connate, ± with staminodes in pistillate flowers; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal or rarely transverse slits. Ovary superior, (1)3 or 6 (to ca. 30), distinct, arranged in 1–5 whorls of 3, divergent; ovules 2 per ovary, quickly reduced to 1 by abortion, attached to the ventral suture, pendulous, hemitropous to amphitropous; stigma terminal or oblique, sessile or subsessile. Staminate flowers sometimes with pistillodes.

Fruit: Drupes or nuts; exocarp membranous or subcoriaceous; mesocarp ± pulpy; endocarp often bony; rugose; tuberculate; or ribbed. Seeds often horseshoe–shaped; endosperm ± ruminate; sometimes scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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