Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs or annual to perennial herbs, sometimes scandent, rarely trees, usually pubescent with simple, often glandular to stellate or peltate hairs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves compound (trifoliate or palmate). Alternate or rarely opposite. Petiolate. Stipules often absent, when present, small and modified into glands or small spines.

Flowers: Flowers usually in bracteate racemes, occasionally solitary and axillary. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or rarely unisexual, actinomorphic to zygomorphic. Calyx of (2–)4(–5) sepals; sepals usually distinct and alternate with the sepals, often clawed, rarely absent. Corolla of (2–)4(–6) petals; petals often in 2 pairs, distinct or connate at base. Stamens 4(6 to numerous), alternate with the petals, some represented by staminodes; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, sometimes on a gynophore, 2(–12)-carpellate, 1-celled, placentation parietal, occasionally the placentas deeply intruded, rarely sometimes meeting in the center forming a 2-celled ovary; ovules (1–)numerous, campylotropous or rarely anatropous.

Fruit: Fruit usually a berry or a dry; elongate; dehiscent or indehiscent capsules; usually stipitate; the valves falling away at maturity leaving the persistent septum; rarely a nut or drupe. Seeds often reniform; endosperm scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: