Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small trees or shrubs, rarely scandent, with watery sap.

Stems: Branches tomentose to appressed or somewhat spreading hirsute or puberulent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Lower surfaces with veins hispid to appressed hirsute or puberulent. Margins crenate to serrate or entire, thin and chartaceous to thick and coriaceous. Palmately 3-veined or 5-veined, pinnately veined toward apex, veins ± red, with punctiform cystoliths, usually visible on upper surface, especially in dried leaves, lower surface with veins hispid to appressed hirsute or puberulent, areoles usually white to gray or olive gray woolly pubescent. Usually long-petiolate. Stipules thin or sometimes thick, deeply 2–lobed or subentire, caducous or sometimes persistent.

Flowers: Flowers in sessile, axillary, paniculate, spicate, or head-like clusters, bracts small. Flowers unisexual (and the plants dioecious, monoecious, or gynodioecious); Pistillate flower receptacle constituting a condensed peduncle, pedicels and true receptacle becoming globose, white and fleshy. Calyx of staminate flowers herbaceous, 4-lobed, the lobes about as long as the tube, usually pubescent; pistillate Calyx tubular, herbaceous, narrowed toward apex, enlarging in fruit, apex minutely 4–5– toothed, usually pubescent. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens in staminate flower 4–5; filaments incurved in bud, elastically reflexed when pollen is shed; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, versatile, caducous; pistillate flower staminodes absent. Ovary superior, staminate flower pistillode usually densely tomentose; pistillate flower ovary enclosed by calyx; stigma filiform, exserted, caducous after anthesis.

Fruit: Achenes ca. 0.7–1.7 mm long; closely enclosed by the dry calyx; but distinct from it; embedded in the fleshy receptacle. Seeds 1 per achene; with very little endosperm; cotyledons broad.

Ploidy:

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