Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Vines, shrubs, or trees.

Stems: Stems usually twining, sometimes prostrate or floating, herbaceous to woody, glabrous or pubescent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple, rarely compound. Alternate. Blades lobed, or divided. Apex acute, obtuse, acuminate to obtuse–mucronate or emarginate. Base acute, cordate to truncate, petiolate, subsessile, or sessile. Surfaces glabrous or pubescent. Margins entire. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers 1 to numerous, usually axillary, solitary or in dichasia or rarely in paniculate inflorescences, pedicels long or short, bracts scale-like to foliose. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic, 5-merous. Calyx of 5 sepals, distinct, imbricate, herbaceous to subcoriaceous, equal or unequal, ovate to oblong or lanceolate, glabrous to pubescent, often somewhat enlarging in fruit but not markedly accrescent, persistent, occasionally accrescent. Corolla of 5 fused petals. Stamens 5, distinct; included or rarely exserted; filaments inserted on corolla tube base alternate with corolla lobes; anthers dithecal, usually linear or oblong, extrorse. Ovary superior, 2–4-carpellate, usually with as many cells, placentation basal or basal-axile; ovules 2(4, 6) per cell, or ovary 1-celled and ovules 4, these erect, anatropous; style 1, filiform, simple or bifid, or sometimes with 2 distinct style; stigma globose or 2–3-lobed, the lobes globose.

Fruit: Fruit a globose to ovoid capsules; dehiscent by 4 valves or rarely 6 valves; or splitting irregularly. Seeds 1-4; rarely 6; glabrous or pubescent; endosperm absent or scanty; cartilaginous; cotyledons usually foliaceous.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Spread through the tropics and subtropics of the world.

Elevation Range: