Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Monoecious or dioecious annual or perennial herbs, trees, or shrubs, sometimes vines or stem succulents, often with milky or colored latex.

Stems: Sometimes vines or stem succulents, often with milky or colored latex.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple, compound or sometimes greatly reduced. Alternate, occasionally opposite, or rarely whorled. Veins pinnate or palmate. Petioles present or absent. Stipules usually present, sometimes conspicuous and often protecting terminal buds, sometimes represented by hair-like structures, glands, thorns, or absent.

Flowers: Flowers in diverse types of inflorescences, but ultimately of cymose origin. sometimes very reduced and grouped into secondary clusters of staminate and pistillate flowers resembling individual flowers (cyathia). Flowers unisexual, actinomorphic. Calyx (2–)5(–11)-lobed, or absent. Corolla usually absent, when present, composed pof 4–13, distinct petals. Stamens 1 to numerous, distinct or connate in various ways, in 1–2 series; anthers dithecal, dehiscing longitudinally. Ovary superior, (2)3(–5, 10)-carpellate, nearly always (2)3-celled, placentation axile; ovules 1(2) per cell, anatropous or hemitropous; styles 2–5, distinct or connate; stigmas discoid.

Fruit: Capsules septicidal; separating often elastically into mericarps; and opening ventrally to release the seeds; occasionally fruit drupaceous; samaroid; or berry-like. Seeds 1–2 per cell; often with a micropylar caruncle; endosperm usually copious and oily; often containing poisonous proteins; rarely absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: