Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Semisucculent annual or perennial herbs, rarely subshrubs.

Stems: Stems often rather translucent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, opposite, or whorled. Surfaces usually glabrous. Margins entire or toothed. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent or consisting of a pair of petiolar glands.

Flowers: Flowers solitary or in small, often umbellate cymes. Flowers bisexual (perfect), strongly irregular. Calyx of 3 or 5 sepals, when 3, the upper ones small or aborted, the posterior one petaloid and usually spurred. Corolla of 5 petals, the upper one distinct, external in bud and often partly sepaloid, the other 4 connate into lateral pairs or distinct. Stamens 5; filaments flat, connate above; anthers dithecal, introrse, short, connate or coherent, forming a cap over the ovary, the sporogenous tissue divided into packets by a transverse partition. Ovary superior, (4)5-carpellate, with as numerous cells, placentation axile; ovules several to many per cell, pendulous and apotropous or anatropous; style 1, short; stigma 1 or 5.

Fruit: Capsules explosively dehiscent; loculicidal; the valves rubbery and becoming twisted in dehiscence. Seeds with endosperm scanty or (in Hydrocera) entirely absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: