Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs or shrubs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or lower ones opposite. Surfaces usually mealy pubescent. Margins entire to dentate or serrate, sometimes irregularly lobed. Petiolate to sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in axillary or terminal spikes or panicles, or solitary, in monoecious plants the sexes mixed in axillary clusters or staminate flowers above pistillate flowers; staminate flowers without subtending bracts; pistillate flowers each subtended by 2 accrescent bracts enclosing the fruit, the bracts connate or distinct toward apex, fleshy or hardened and bony at maturity the margins entire or dentate to laciniate, the faces smooth or appendaged. Flowers unisexual (and the plants monoecious or dioecious). Calyx of staminate flower with 3–5 lobes; lobes oblong to obovate. Calyx of pistillate flower absent, rarely present and 3–5-lobed, membranous. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens 3–5 in staminate flowers, inserted on calyx at base; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits; Stamens absent in pistillate flowers. Ovary superior (pistillate flowers), ovoid to depressed–globose, 2–3(–5)-carpellate, 1-celled, placentation basal; ovule 1; stigmas 2, filiform, dry. Staminate flowers ovary vestigial or absent.

Fruit: Utricle with membranous pericarp; enclosed by the persistent bracts. Seeds 1 per fruit; erect or inverted; rarely horizontal.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: