Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or biennial herbs.

Stems: Caulescent, branched, pubescent.

Roots: Taprooted.

Leaves: Leaves simple or compound (decompound). Alternate. Blades when simple pinnately divided, usually with small ultimate divisions. Petioles sheathing. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in lax, compound umbels, or the umbels subcompact by incurving of the rays after anthesis. peduncles terminal and axillary. involucre and involucel of dissected or entire bracts or bractlets, occasionally absent. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx teeth present or absent. Corolla of 5 petals; petals usually white, sometimes the central or all flowers purplish or yellowish; obcordate, unequally cleft, with a narrower inflexed apex, the outer petals often radiant. Stamens 5, inserted on an epigynous disk. Ovary inferior, 2-celled; ovules 1 per cells, anatropous; styles 2, usually swollen at base into a stylopodium. Styles short, the stylopodium conical; carpophore entire or bifid.

Fruit: Fruit oblong to ovoid; compressed dorsally; primary ribs filiform and bristly; the secondary ribs winged with each wing divided into a single row of barbed or glochidiate prickles; vittae solitary under the secondary ribs; 2 on the commissure. Seeds 1 per mericarp; embryo small; endosperm cartilaginous. seed face shallowly concave to plane.

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