Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees or shrubs, sometimes subshrubs or perennial herbs, often with thorns, occasionally sprawling or twining or with coiled tendrils.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple, sometimes very reduced and then stems photosynthetic. Alternate or occasionally opposite. Epidermis usually mucilaginous or with scattered mucilage cells. Veins pinnate or with several principal veins at base. Petiolate. Stipules usually present, small, occasionally modified into spines.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal or axillary cymes or umbellate, racemose, or axillary fascicles that may be reduced to a single flower. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or rarely unisexual (and then plants usually dioecious), actinomorphic, floral tube cup–shaped, sometimes adnate to nectary disk. Calyx of (4)5 sepals; sepals deltate, arising as lobes on floral tube, valvate in bud, sometimes inner side with a fleshy, glossy layer that ends as a tubercle near apex. Corolla of (4)5, often clawed, usually concave or hooded, or sometimes absent. Stamens (4)5, opposite the petals; filaments distinct, adnate to base of petals; anthers usually dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior or appearing partly or completely inferior by the obscuring nectary disk, 2–3(–5)-carpellate, with as many cells, the cells sometimes imperfect; ovules 1 per cell, basal and erect, anatropous; style slightly lobed or deeply cleft.

Fruit: Fruit drupaceous; with separate stones or a several–celled stone; occasionally dry and tardily dehiscent or separating into mericarps. Seeds sometimes with a single groove; endosperm usually scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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