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. <b>Stipules</b> usually present, occasionally adnate to petiole, or rarely absent. 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. <b>Calyx</b> of (3–)5(–10) sepals; sepals imbricate, often appearing as lobes of the hypanthium. <b>Corolla</b> of (3–)5(–10), distinct, imbricate, often large and conspicuous, equal or rarely somewhat unequal, occasionally absent. <b>Stamens</b> usually numerous, often in sets of 5 or 10, occasionally as few as 5 or 1; <u>filaments</u> slender, distinct or occasionally connate, inserted on the hypanthium; <u>anthers</u> dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits or rarely by terminal pores. <b>Ovary</b> superior with 1 to numerous distinct carpels or inferior and compound, 2–5-carpellate, placentation marginal or axile in compound ovary; <u>ovules</u> 1 to numerous, anatropous or occasionally hemitropous or campylotropous; <u>styles</u> 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. <b>Seeds</b> with endosperm absent or occasionally copious and fleshy.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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