Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herbs or (especially in Hawai'i) shrubs to small trees.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, rarely opposite or whorled. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in racemes, heads, axillary cymes, or solitary in the leaf axils. Flowers bisexual (perfect), strongly irregular. Calyx tubular, usually (3–)5-lobed. Corolla often unilabiate or bilabiate, 5-lobed. Stamens 5, distinct or adnate to base of corolla; anthers introrse, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, the pollen shed from the coherent anthers and collected by the indusium on the outgrowing style. Ovary inferior, half inferior, or rarely superior, 2-carpellate or possibly 4-carpellate, 1–4-celled; ovule placentation axile or basal-axile; style solitary with a fringed, cuplike indusium just below and surrounding the 1–2-lobed stigma.

Fruit: Fruit capsular; drupaceous; or nut-like. Seeds 1 to numerous; with oily endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: