Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees, shrubs, or lianas.

Stems: Stems erect or ascending, unbranched or branched, sympodial, conspicuously marked with leaf scars.

Roots: With aerial and adventitious roots, these either rigid (prop roots) or flexible (feeding roots, clasping roots), or sometimes early abortive as nubs or spines.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, spiraled 3-ranked (in Sararanga apparently 4-ranked). Blades linear ensiform to narrowly elliptic, ovate, or obovate, m–shaped with sharply defined or rounded, ill–defined pleats, midrib often keeled, usually prickly at least distally. Apex acute to rounded. Base sheathing, more or less encircling the stem (but never tubular). Surfaces glabrous, glabrate or glaucous. Margins usually prickly. Parallel, longitudinal veins numerous, parallel, connected by perpendicular commissures to form a reticulate pattern. Petioles absent. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers unisexual (and the plants dioecious), or rarely in Freycinetia a mosaic, sometimes the staminate inflorescences with pistillodia and/or the pistillate with staminodia, small and numerous in a spadix subtended by (l–)several large spathes, or in several racemosely or umbellately arranged spadices or (in Sararanga) in large terminal panicles, pedunculate, the spathaceous bracts leaf like at base, white, yellow, pink, scarlet, orange, purplish, bronze, or of mixed colors, rarely green, in Pandanus and Sararanga usually firm, in Freycinetia fleshy to succulent, margins and midribs prickly to serrulate spinulose; perianth absent, except in Sararanga represented by a basal cupule (primordia may occur but never develop in Freycinetia). Flowers unisexual (plants dioecious). Calyx (sepals) absent. Corolla (petals) absent. Staminate flowers with 1 to numerous stamens, rarely with pistillodia, in groups of 3 or more, ± connate into bundles or borne in crowded clusters; anthers tetrathecal. Ovary superior; Pistillate spadix consisting of 1-celled carpels of 2-celled to many-celled syncarps; stigma terminal, grooved on the edge, sessile or raised on a styloid process, this sometimes spine-like; ovules 1 per carpel in Pandanus and Sararanga, several to numerous in Freycinetia.

Fruit: Fruit of crowded polydrupes or drupes; forming an oblong to ellipsoid or globose syncarp; pericarp thin to fleshy or coarsely fibrous in Pandanus; mesocarp with spongy pith and fibrous in upper part; t with variously sized cavities; and pulpy; fleshy–fibrous or fleshy at base; endocarp thin and soft in Freycinetia and Sararanga; woody and bony in Pandanus. Seeds in Pandanus large; remaining within the endocarp; in Freycinetia and Sararanga small; with a firm coat; becoming separated from the endocarp; endosperm fleshy.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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