Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees, shrubs, perennial herbs, or occasionally annual herbs, ± with thorns or prickles.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple or compound. Alternate or rarely opposite. Usually petiolate. Stipules usually present, occasionally adnate to petiole, or rarely absent.

Flowers: Flowers in a great variety of cymose or racemose inflorescences, rarely solitary, often with an epicalyx (whorl of small sepal-like bracts alternating with calyx lobes). Flowers bisexual (perfect) and actinomorphic. Receptacle usually hollowed, forming a hypanthium when ovary superior, inner surface often nectariferous. Calyx of (3–)5(–10) sepals; sepals imbricate, often appearing as lobes of the hypanthium. Corolla of (3–)5(–10), distinct, imbricate, often large and conspicuous, equal or rarely somewhat unequal, occasionally absent. Stamens usually numerous, often in sets of 5 or 10, occasionally as few as 5 or 1; filaments slender, distinct or occasionally connate, inserted on the hypanthium; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits or rarely by terminal pores. Ovary superior with 1 to numerous distinct carpels or inferior and compound, 2–5-carpellate, placentation marginal or axile in compound ovary; ovules 1 to numerous, anatropous or occasionally hemitropous or campylotropous; styles usually 2–5 in compound ovary.

Fruit: Fruit various; often of follicles or achenes; these sometimes embedded on an enlarged fleshy receptacle or enclosed in the swollen hypanthium; or fruit consisting of laterally coherent drupelets or sometimes a pome; rarely a capsules. Seeds with endosperm absent or occasionally copious and fleshy.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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