Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, subshrubs, or rarely soft-wooded trees or lianas, with watery or rarely milky sap, often with stinging hairs, usually with mucilage cells, occasionally with unbranched latex channels.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or opposite. Blades usually with cystoliths, especially prominent in dried leaves. Petiolate. Stipules usually present.

Flowers: Flowers in cymose, sometimes congested and headlike, usually axillary inflorescences, sometimes solitary. Flowers usually wind–pollinated, unisexual (and the plants monoecious, dioecious, or polygamous), actinomorphic or rarely slightly irregular. staminate flowers with a vestigial and sterile ovary. pistillate flower with staminodes present opposite the sepals. Calyx of staminate flowers with (3)4–5(6) sepals; Calyx of pistillate flowers with 3–4(5) sepals, these distinct or connate, or sepals absent, sometimes scale-like. Corolla (petals) absent. Staminate flowers with (3)4–5(6) Stamens opposite the sepals, rarely only 1 stamen; filaments incurved in bud, elastically reflexed when pollen is shed; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, pseudomonomerous, 1-celled; ovule 1, basal, orthotropous, occasionally hemitropous; style 1; stigma capitate or filiform and decurrent.

Fruit: Fruit an achene or nut; rarely drupaceous; often enclosed in the persistent; dry or fleshy; accrescent sepals. Seeds 1 per achene; seed coat reduced or vestigial; endosperm oily or starchy.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: