Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Brittle subshrubs or sometimes perennial herbs, parasitic on woody dicotyledons or rarely conifers, producing haustoria that penetrate the host.

Stems: Stems strongly jointed.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple (strongly reduced). Opposite, pairs of leaves ± connate into a collar at the top of the internode. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in clusters in the leaf axils, surrounded by a patch of usually dark hairs, the flower groups becoming many–flowered through later development of collateral and serial adventitious buds, sometimes forming a continuous band around the stem, all clusters with staminate and pistillate flowers intermingled. Flowers unisexual; staminate flowers globose in bud, later with 3 triangular segments; pistillate flowers clavate or pear–shaped in bud; each flower subtended by a small bract. Calyx (sepals) absent. Corolla of pistillate flowers 3-lobed, the lobes short, triangular, valvate. Stamens in staminate flower connate into a globose synandrium, 6-celled; anthers opening by slits toward the center of the synandrium, apical pore. Pollen ultimately pouring out from a single central. Ovary inferior (pistillate flowers), 3–4-carpellate, 1-celled; style terminal; stigma nipple–shaped, the embryo sacs first growing downward, then curving upward in the ovary wall, eventually U–shaped.

Fruit: Berries clavate or pear–shaped; with persistent corolla; fleshy; glossy. Seeds 1 per fruit; flattened in the upper portion; often explosively ejected from the fruit; seed coat absent; endosperm starchy; chlorophyllose.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: