Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, rarely vines or small trees.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple or occasionally pinnately compound. Opposite or occasionally whorled, rarely alternate. Margins often toothed. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers usually in small, compact, axillary cymes, forming verticillate arrangements at each node, together often forming a thyrse, sometimes cymes reduced to solitary flowers, thus essentially arranged in racemose inflorescences, each flower +/- bracteolate. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or sometimes unisexual (and then plants gynodioecious or rarely dioecious). Calyx actinomorphic, occasionally bilabiate, tubular, campanulate, or funnelform, usually 5-toothed, splitting longitudinally, usually persistent or sometimes only ventral 1/2 persistent. Corolla strongly zygomorphic, usually bilabiate, 4-5-lobed, rarely nearly actinomorphic; nectary disk often present at base of ovary, annular or developed on anterior side only. Stamens 4, 1 pair usually longer than the other, or 2, occasionally with an additional pair of staminodes, inserted on the corolla tube, aligned with the sinuses; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, occasionally 1 theca reduced or absent or the 2 thecae confluent, occasionally the connective elongate and thus separating the thecae, most visible in Salvia. Ovary superior, rarely on a gynophore, 2-carpellate, each carpel longitudinally divided, thus 4 +/- distinct segments connate only at the gynobasic style, sometimes ovary merely 4-lobed, ca. 1/2 its length; style arising between lobes, placentation basal-axile; ovules 1 per ovary lobe, anatropous to hemitropous or apotropous; style 1, usually cleft; stigmas 2, sometimes 1 reduced and vestigial.

Fruit: Fruit of (1-)4 1-seeded nutlets or nutlets drupaceous with a fleshy exocarp; nutlets often becoming mucilaginous when wet. Seeds with endosperm absent or scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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