Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial slender herbs.

Stems: Creeping stems or rootstocks.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades peltate or nonpeltate, sometimes lobed or divided. Peltate or nonpeltate, sometimes lobed or divided. Margins entire, toothed to crenate. Palmately veined. Petioles not sheathing. Stipules present.

Flowers: Flowers few to numerous in simple umbels, sometimes proliferous, or in spikes with few–flowered veticils. Involucre and involucel absent. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx teeth minute or absent. Corolla of 5 petals, greenish white, yellowish white, or purplish, ovate. Stamens 5, inserted on an epigynous disk. Ovary inferior, 2-celled; ovules 1 per cells, anatropous; styles 2, usually swollen at base into a stylopodium. Styles usually longer than the conical to depressed stylopodium; carpophore absent.

Fruit: Fruit consisting of 2 mericarps connate by their faces (commissure); compressed to flattened laterally; mericarps rounded or acute dorsally; glabrous to pubescent; with ribs 5; filiform; distinct or indistinct; companion cells present in the pericarp; but vittae absent. Mericarps separating at maturity and usually suspended from a persistent axis (carpophore); or carpophore absent; vittae in pericarp. Seeds 1 per mericarp; embryo small; endosperm cartilaginous. seed face plane to convex.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: