Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs or small trees.

Stems: Branches sometimes spinose.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or sometimes whorled or opposite. Margins usually entire. Sessile, subsessile, or petiolate. Stipules usually absent, rarely represented by glands.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal or axillary racemes or spikes, sometimes contracted into heads, rarely in paniculate inflorescences or solitary, each flower subtended by a small, caducous or persistent bract and 2 bracteoles. Flowers bisexual (perfect), zygomorphic. Calyx of 5 sepals, strongly unequal, inner 2 (wings) usually larger and often petaloid, outer 3 smaller, usually greenish, all deciduous or persistent. Corolla of 3(5), lower one (keel) clawed, boat–shaped, entire or lobed and crested, lateral 2 rarely present, but if so, minute, lowest and upper 2 adnate to staminal tube, median petal boat–shaped. Stamens 8; filaments connate nearly to apex into a sheath split along upper side, adnate basally to keel and upper 2 petals; anthers basifixed. Ovary superior, laterally compressed, usually 2-celled, placentation apical; ovules 1 per cell, pendulous; style simple, elongate, terminal.

Fruit: Fruit a 2–celled capsules; flattened perpendicular to the partition; indehiscent or loculicidal; sometimes 1 cell abortive; often margined or winged. Seeds 1 per cell; globose to fusiform; usually pubescent and arillate.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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