Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees, shrubs, sometimes lianas, or rarely herbs, often with unbranched glandular hairs, nearly always with milky sap borne in laticifers in the stem and often in the leaves.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple or rarely compound. Alternate or opposite. Blades often with cystoliths. Often with foliar nectaries on blades or upper surfaces of petioles, absent in several species. Petiolate, petiole adaxially grooved. Stipules present.

Flowers: Flowers in compact axillary cymes, these arranged in racemose, spicate, umbellate, or head-like inflorescences, or lining an invaginated common receptacle. Flowers small, usually wind–pollinated or insect–pollinated, unisexual (and the plants monoecious or dioecious), actinomorphic. Calyx lobes (1–)4–5(–8), connate or sometimes distinct, sometimes in 2 whorls or absent. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens usually as many as and opposite the sepals, rarely 1–3, absent in pistillate flowers; filaments straight or inflexed in bud; anthers dithecal or in some Ficus species monothecal, dehiscing longitudinally. Ovary superior to inferior, 2-carpellate, 1–2-celled, placentation apical or rarely basal; ovules 1 per cell, anatropous to hemitropous or campylotropous, ovary vestigial or completely absent in staminate flowers; styles usually 2, 1 sometimes strongly reduced.

Fruit: Fruit usually drupaceous or a small achene; ± dehiscent; sometimes forming a syncarp by fusion of the fruit of different flowers; fruit sometimes (Ficus) aggregated on the common receptacle to form a fleshy syconium. Seeds with endosperm fleshy and oily or absent; embryo often curved.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: