Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small to large, usually glabrous perennial herbs with aromatic oil cells.

Stems: Rhizomes short or elongate, sympodial, starchy. shoots erect or ascending, unbranched, usually terminating in an inflorescence, or inflorescence with only scale-like leaf sheaths and foliage leaves on separate shoots.

Roots: Fibrous root system.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, distichous. Surfaces glabrous or with unicellular sunken hairs. Margins entire. Lateral veins parallel, diverging from prominent midrib. Petiolate or sessile, with elongate, open or rarely closed sheaths. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers sessile, or in racemes, heads, or thyrses; bracts usually spirally arranged, occasionally absent, each subtending a single flower or a cincinnus of flowers, bracteoles (secondary bracts) open to base, tubular, or absent. Flowers usually bisexual (perfect), zygomorphic, pedicellate. Calyx 3-lobed, the lobes unequal. Corolla adnate with the stamens into a floral tube, distally 3-lobed; lobes varying in size and shape, usually petaloid and dissimilar to calyx in texture and color. Stamens 5, in 2 whorls, only the posterior one of the inner whorl fertile, the other 2 members of inner whorl connate to form a highly variable, often conspicuous labellum, the anterior member of the outer whorl absent, the other 2 members of outer whorl sometimes present as petaloid staminodes and adnate with the labellum in some genera; anthers dithecal, ± with a prominent crest. Ovary inferior, with 2 variously developed apical nectary glands, 3-celled, sometimes incompletely so, rarely 1-celled, placentation axile, parietal (or essentially basal), or rarely free-central; ovules usually numerous; style filiform, often enveloped in a groove of the fertile stamen and embraced by the thecae; stigma various, often papillose and protruding beyond anther.

Fruit: Loculicidal capsules (usually); sometimes berry-like and indehiscent. Seeds arillate.

Ploidy:

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