Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, shrubs, or occasionally trees or lianas, often covered with firm unicellular hairs with a basal cystolith.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, occasionally lower ones opposite, rarely all opposite. Margins usually entire. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers usually in 1 or more determinate, scorpioid or helicoid cymes that uncoil progressively as the flowers open, occasionally flowers solitary and axillary. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic or occasionally slightly irregular. Calyx (4)5(6)-merous, sepals distinct or connate at base, sometimes to above the middle. Corolla salverform, funnelform, or tubular, (4)5(6)-lobed, the tube often with scales at the summit opposite the lobes, formed by invagination of the corolla tube, the lobes imbricate or convolute, rarely valvate. Stamens as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted on the tube, sometimes unequal, often with basal appendages; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2(4–5)-carpellate, the carpels connate to various degrees, 2-celled, often becoming 4-celled by means of false septa, entire to 4-lobed; ovules usually 4, 2 per carpel, eventually 1 per cell, sometimes fewer by abortion, anatropous, erect, ascending, or nearly horizontal, rarely pendulous; style 1(2), sometimes 2-lobed, gynobasic, arising from between the essentially distinct ovary lobes, sometimes terminal, often heterostylous; stigma usually simple, capitate or discoid, sometimes 2-lobed or 4-lobed.

Fruit: Fruit usually consisting of (1–)4 1–seeded; separate nutlets or 1–2 1–4–seeded nuts or drupelets; these variously sculptured; pubescent or glabrous and ± glossy. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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