Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Evergreen trees or shrubs, often with mangrove habit (with knee roots or stilt roots and growing in tidal or inundated areas).

Stems: Stems often somewhat swollen at the nodes.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Margins entire. Petiolate. Stipules conspicuous, interpetiolar, sheathing in the terminal bud, caducous.

Flowers: Flowers solitary in the leaf axils or in few–flowered cymes or rarely racemes, each flower sometimes subtended by connate bracteoles. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or occasionally some of them unisexual (and then plants polygamous or monoecious). Calyx of (3)4–5 (–16) sepals; sepals valvate, thick and often fleshy or leathery. Corolla of (3)4–5(–16), alternate with the sepals, distinct, usually fleshy and shorter than sepals, entire, 2-lobed, or lacerate or fringed, caducous, convolute or conduplicate in bud. Stamens twice as many or sometimes 3–4 times as many as sepals, rarely numerous, sometimes some of them staminodial; filaments distinct or connate at base; anthers dithecal or (in Rhizophora) cross–partitioned, opening by longitudinal slits or (in Rhizophora) opening by a large ventral valve. Ovary inferior or rarely partly superior, 2–5(–12)-carpellate, with as many cells or 1-celled by suppression of the septa, placentation apical-axile; ovules 2(4 to numerous) per cell, pendulous, anatropous or hemitropous; style 1 or as many as carpels, terminal; stigma simple or lobed.

Fruit: Fruit fleshy; rarely a capsules. Seeds 1 per fruit or 1 per cell; occasionally arillate; in species with mangrove habit viviparous with an enlarged hypocotyl; endosperm well–developed; fleshy; and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: