Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Herbs, shrubs, or trees, branched or unbranched, unarmed or rarely muricate, usually with milky sap.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Margins entire or toothed. Rarely pinnately lobed or parted or nearly compound. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers solitary in the axils of cauline leaves or arranged in terminal or axillary racemes, spikes, or cymes; hypanthium obovoid to cylindrical. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx 5-lobed, sepals connate, tube adnate to ovary. Corolla actinomorphic or, if zygomorphic, then often laterally fenestrate or dorsally cleft, connate, with 5 valvate lobes. Stamens 5, alternate with corolla lobes; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, coherent but separating after anthesis or connate and forming a tube into which pollen is shed; filaments distinct or connate above, attached to the epigynous nectary disk or to base of corolla, rarely adnate to corolla tube. Ovary inferior, sometimes only partly so, rarely almost superior, 2–5-carpellate, with as many cells as carpels; ovule placentation axile, or when 1-celled with 2 parietal placentas, often crowned with an annular nectary disk; stigmas wet or dry, 2–5-lobed, appressed and nonreceptive as the style grows through the anther tube, pushing out the pollen, after which the stigmas spread apart and become receptive.

Fruit: Berries or a loculicidal; poricidal; or rarely circumscissile capsules. Seeds numerous; small; with a straight; short to spatulate dicotyledonous embryo embedded in oily endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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