Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Glabrous, usually glaucous annual or rhizomatous perennial herbs, sometimes somewhat woody at base.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Margins entire, dentate, or pinnatifid. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in dense, terminal, usually compound, cymose inflorescences, bracteate. Flowers small, bisexual (perfect) or unisexual. Calyx 5–25-toothed, in rolled at anthesis, enlarging and spreading in fruit to form a plumose pappus. Corolla 5-lobed, the tube slender, gibbous near middle or spurred near base, the lobes usually unequal. Stamen 1, adnate to corolla tube; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior, 3-carpellate; ovule pendulous, anatropous, apical; style 1; stigma entire to 3-lobed.

Fruit: Capsules dry; 1–celled; the sterile cells minute; crowned with the plumose pappus. Seeds 1 per fruit; endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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