Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herbs, erect to scandent shrubs, or lianas, sometimes small to medium-sized trees or succulent, perennial herbs;glabrous or sparsely pubescent, sometimes foetid when bruised or dried.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite, those of a pair equal to subequal. Blades thinly chartaceous to coriaceous. Margins entire. Blade penniveined. Petiolate or subsessile to sessile. Stipules interpetiolar.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences terminal or sometimes axillary, cymose-paniculate or -corymbiform, often trichotomous, a solitary flower, or in reduced cymes. Flowers insect-pollinated, bisexual (perfect) or sometimes functionally unisexual, often heterostylous. Calyx 4-5-lobed with open aestivation, the lobes usually small, rudimentary, or absent, occasionally 1 or more enlarged and brightly colored. Corolla white to greenish white, pink, purplish, or purplish green, usually fleshy, salverform, occasionally companulate or urceolate, sometimes dimorphic in size, 4-5-lobed, lobes valvate in bud, with apical appendage; nectary disc present. Stamens as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted on corolla tube midway or near throat; anthers sessile or on short filaments, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior or partly so, 2(-4)-locular; ovules few to numerous on fleshy placentas near middle of septum; style as many as carpels, cylindrical to filiform, terminal, slender; stigma bilobed or subcapitate, included or exserted.

Fruit: Dry capsules or rarely fleshy; endocarp weakly to strongly sclerified; mesocarp thin or rarely thick; dehiscence loculicidal partly or nearly to base; or only across nectary disc; usually followed by septicidal separation; sometimes dehiscence septicidal or rarely indehiscent; or indehiscent and berrylike; surrounded by the thick; fleshy and juicy hypanthium. Seeds few to numerous; variable in shape; hat or fan-shaped and laterally cuneate and compressed; or ovoid to ellipsoid with conspicuous bubble-shaped bodies included in the areoles (cells); or flat and broadly winged with a lateral hilum attached at wing margin; or bricklike or blocky with a centeric adaxial hilum; with well-developed oily endosperm; or endosperm occasionally scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

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