Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, shrubs, lianas, or small trees, often with extrafloral nectaries.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple (rarely reduced to scales). Alternate, rarely opposite or whorled. Surfaces often glandular punctate. Margins entire. Petioles present or absent. Stipules absent or represented by glands or rarely spines.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal or axillary spikes, racemes, or panicles, with bracts and bracteoles. Flowers bisexual (perfect), strongly zygomorphic. Calyx usually of 5 sepals; sepals distinct or rarely connate at base, lateral (inner) 2 often larger than others and petaloid. Corolla of 3(5) petals; petals lowest and upper 2 adnate to staminal tube, lateral 2 much–reduced, median petal boat–shaped and often fringed toward apex. Stamens usually 8, in 2 whorls, sometimes 3–7 or 10, usually connate at base into an open tube; anthers basifixed, tetrasporangiate, the ventral sporangia often reduced, sometimes trisporangiate or bisporangiate, opening by 1–2 apical or subapical pores, rarely by elongated slits. Ovary superior, 2(5–8)-carpellate, with as many cells or sometimes 1-celled, placentation apical; ovules usually 1 per cell, pendulous, anatropous to hemitropous; style simple, terminal, usually curved and apically 2-lobed, one lobe stigmatic, the other usually ending in a tuft of hairs, sometimes style unlobed and stigma capitate.

Fruit: Loculicidal capsules; nut; samara; or drupe; or sometimes an indehiscent capsules. Seeds often pubescent; endosperm well–developed; oily and proteinaceous; sometimes also starchy; sometimes scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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