Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees, shrubs, lianas, vines, or herbs, occasionally stem-succulents with reduced leaves, usually with abundant milky sap.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite or whorled, rarely alternate. Margins entire. Veins accompanied by laticifers. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent, vestigial, or small and interpetiolar.

Flowers: Flowers in cymes or racemes. Flowers usually showy, bisexual (perfect) or rarely functionally unisexual, actinomorphic or nearly so. Calyx of (4)5 sepals; sepals connate at base, convolute, imbricate or valvate. Corolla (4)5-lobed, usually salverform or funnelform, the lobes convolute, rarely imbricate or valvate in bud, often bearing appendages within the tube, these sometimes connate. Stamens (4)5 as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted on the tube; anthers often basifixed, distinct or coherent near apex of style, usually dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, often tailed at base, then fertile only in the distal part. In some specines, the pollen grains connate into 1–2 waxy, sac–shaped masses (called pollinia) per theca, the pollinia of adjacent cells of contiguous anthers united by a translator (connective) derived from glandular cells on the angles of the style apex which conceals the stigmatic tissue, forming a pair of pollinia which is the unit of pollination, the combined adnate filaments; anthers, and style form a central gynostemium, flowers usually with a well–developed corona consisting of some combination of various erect or incurved, usually nectariferous, petaloid, hood–shaped or horn–shaped appendages arising from or near the base of the filaments, or sometimes from the backs or apex of the anthers. Ovary superior or nearly so, 2(8)-carpellate, carpels connate to varying degrees, ovary 2-celled with a single or apically cleft style, or a 1-celled compound ovary with parietal placentas, these sometimes separated below to varying degrees and connate by their common style or stigma; ovules 2 to numerous in each ovary or on each placenta in compound ovaries, often pendulous.

Fruit: Follicles often with 2 distinct lobes; sometimes only 1 developing or Capsules berry; or drupaceous. Seeds naked or comose; winged or occasionally arillate; embryo large; endosperm oily or seeds flattened; with a terminal coma of long hairs; endosperm scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: