Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Dioecious or monoecious, climbing or trailing annual or perennial herbs.

Stems: Usually scabrid with short rigid hairs, sometimes hairs multicellular or glandular.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades 5–7–angled to palmately lobed. Petiolate. Stipules absent; tendrils in the stipular position simple or 2–branched.

Flowers: Staminate flowers usually solitary, rarely clustered or in racemes; pistillate flowers solitary. Flowers usually unisexual (and the plants monoecious or dioecious), actinomorphic. Calyx of staminate flowers 5-lobed, inserted on hypanthium. Corolla of staminate flowers 5-lobed, ovate, usually yellow or white, inserted on hypanthium alternate with calyx lobes, usually connate at base, the limb often rotate. Staminate flowers: Stamens 3, inserted at base of hypanthium alternate with corolla lobes; filaments coherent or connate into a column; anthers coherent into a globose head opening by longitudinal slits, 2 of the anthers dithecal, the other monothecal; pistillate flowers staminodes 3. Ovary inferior, of a single carpel or 3-carpellate with carpels connate into a single 3-lobed cell, placentation parietal; ovules 1 to numerous per cell. Pistillate flowers ovules numerous, horizontal; stigma 3-lobed.

Fruit: Fruit globose to ellipsoid; fleshy; indehiscent. Seeds numerous; ovate; endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: