Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Highly specialized, usually succulent, perennials, shrubs, trees, or vines, terrestrial or epiphytic, usually spiny, the spines variable in number, size, arrangement, and color, produced from specialized axillary structures (areoles).

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves usually absent, or simple (rudimentary or rarely with fleshy blades). Alternate when blade-like, solitary or clustered when modified as spines. Blades reduced, awl–shaped and caducous. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers usually solitary at an areole, rarely grouped in inflorescences. Flowers bisexual (perfect), very rarely unisexual, actinomorphic or occasionally zygomorphic. Tepals 5–50 or more, intergrading gradually from bractlike or sepal-like outer tepals to petal-like inner tepals. Stamens few to numerous, usually inserted in the receptacle tube; anthers dithecal, longitudinally dehiscent. Ovary inferior, very rarely superior, 3-carpellate to many-carpellate, 1-celled; ovules numerous, on parietal placentas, usually campylotropous; style 1; stigma lobes 2 to numerous, papillate.

Fruit: Berries juicy; fleshy; or dry; dehiscent or indehiscent; naked; scaly; pubescent; bristly; or spiny. Seeds numerous; black or brown to white; sometimes covered with a bony aril; variously sculpted; embryo curved or rarely straight; endosperm present or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: