Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees, shrubs, or lianas with milky sap.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or opposite. Sometimes palmately lobed. Base cordate to rounded or broadly cuneate. Margins coarsely and irregularly dentate to serrate–dentate. Primary veins 3-5 and pliveined, secondary veins pinnate. Petiolate. Stipules membranous, caducous.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences of 2 types; staminate flowers in nodding, densely flowered spikes; pistillate flowers in dense globose heads. Flowers unisexual (and the plants dioecious), actinomorphic. Calyx of staminate flowers with 4 sepals; sepals, connate in lower ½; pistillate flower Calyx 2–4-lobed or 2–4-toothed, bladder-shaped. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens in staminate flowers 4, inflexed in bud, opposite the sepals, absent in pistillate flowers; anthers dithecal, dehiscing longitudinally. Ovary superior (pistillate flowers), sessile, sometimes becoming stipitate in fruit; ovules 1 per cell; style 1(2), filiform. Staminate flowers pistillode present, minute.

Fruit: Fruit a syncarp; each fleshy drupe orangish red; included or exserted from the persistent yellow to red sepals. Seeds ovoid; somewhat compressed;1.7–2.5 mm long; endocarp crustaceous to ligneous; embryo curved.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: