Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial vines.

Stems: Stems usually with abundant mucilage cells in stems, slender, twining or scrambling.

Roots: Rhizomes thickened or tuber–bearing.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, opposite, or sometimes basal, somewhat succulent. Blades usually with abundant mucilage cells. Margins entire. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal or axillary panicles, racemes, or spikes. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or sometimes functionally unisexual, actinomorphic, small; each flower subtended by a small bract, bracteoles 2 or 4 in 2 decussate pairs, the upper pair sepa1-like, distinct or connate at base, sometimes adnate to base of corolla. Perianth in 1 series, tepals white or greenish to purple or reddish, 5-lobed, imbricate and connate at base into a tube or sometimes nearly distinct, persistent in fruit. Stamens 5, opposite the petals; filaments adnate to base of petals; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits or by terminal slits or pores. Ovary superior, 3-carpellate, 3-celled in early stages, soon becoming 1-celled by loss of the partition; ovule 1, basal, anatropous to campylotropous; styles 1 or 3.

Fruit: Utricles surrounded by the persistent; often fleshy corolla or by the wing-like persistent upper pair of bracteoles. Seeds globose; true endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

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