Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial or occasionally annual herbs occurring in wet habitats.

Stems: Herbaceous.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, crowded toward base of plant, grass-like. Sheathing, basal sheath weakly differentiated. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers numerous in often white to gray, dense, terminal heads subtended by an involucre of chaffy bracts; receptacle pubescent or with chaffy bracts. Flowers unisexual (and the plants monoecious or sometimes dioecious), actinomorphic or irregular, minute, insect–pollinated or wind–pollinated. Calyx of 2–3 sepals, distinct, basally connate, or connate to form a spathelike scale. Corolla of 2–3, distinct or connate, with a nectary gland at the tip in Eriocaulon, or corolla (petals) absent. Stamens 2 or 4 in 2-merous flowers, (1)3 or 6 in 3-merous ones, opposite the petals when 2 or 3; filaments of staminate flowers adnate to corolla tube or with a slender androphore, the petals and Stamens diverging at its apex; anthers small, dithecal or sometimes monothecal, introrse, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2–3-carpellate, with as many cells, often on a stipe, carpels pendulous; ovules 1 per cell, orthotropous style terminal, 2–3-lobed, the lobes sometimes divided again.

Fruit: Loculicidal capsules. Seeds with mealy endosperm; embryo small; undifferentiated; forming a cap on the endosperm at the micropylar end of the seed.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: