Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Climbing vines or lianas, occasionally erect perennial herbs or shrubs, arising from creeping, often tuber–bearing, starchy rhizomes.

Stems: Stems occasionally twining, usually branched, often with recurved prickles.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or sometimes opposite. Blades usually with 3–7 curved convergent principal veins. Usually petiolate, petioles firm and somewhat hooked or curved in nontendril genera; usually with a pair of tendrils arising from the petiole near its junction with the open sheath. Stipules absent but with tendril often interpreted as stipules.

Flowers: Flowers in axillary umbels, racemes, spikes of umbels or sometimes other axillary or terminal inflorescences, or (in Smilax) solitary. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or (in Smilax) unisexual (and then plants dioecious), actinomorphic. Perianth of 6 tepals, in 2 series, usually all similar and petaloid, distinct or connate at base. Stamens (3–)6(–18), staminodes present in pistillate flowers; filaments distinct, adnate to tepals, or in some Smilax connate into a column; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior or rarely inferior, 3-carpellate, 1-celled or 3-celled, absent in staminate flowers, placentation parietal or axile; ovules 1–numerous per placenta, orthotropous, anatropous, or hemitropous to campylotropous; styles 1 or 3, distinct or connate at base; stigma capitate or 3-lobed.

Fruit: Berries; pericarp rarely becoming dry and dehiscent with age. Seeds 1–3 or rarely numerous; with hard endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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