Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small trees, shrubs, woody lianas, or herbs, often with spines or thorns, leaves, flowers, and fruit usually glandular punctate, fragrant with essential oils, bark comparatively thin.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves compound (pinnate or unifoliate), or simple. Alternate, or opposite, rarely whorled. Petioles usually jointed, sometimes winged. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal or axillary, bracteate panicles, cymes, or racemes, or solitary. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or functionally unisexual (and the plants dioecious or monoecious), actinomorphic. Calyx of (2–)4–5 sepals; sepals often imbricate, sometimes valvate. Corolla of (2–)4–5(6) petals; petals usually greenish, white, cream, or yellow, distinct or very rarely connate to form a tubular corolla. Stamens 4–5, or 8–10, or more numerous, distinct or connate to form a staminal tube, equal or alternately long and short, all or only the longer ones functional, or intermixed with staminodia; anthers dithecal, often with 1 to several glands. Ovary superior, (2–)4–5(–20)-carpellate, with as many cells, completely connate, or distinct at base but connate by the styles; ovules 1–2, rarely more, per cell, placentation axile.

Fruit: Capsules follicle; berry; drupe; or hesperidium (citrus); endocarp membranous to osseous; often pubescent within; in hesperidia the hairs sometimes enlarged as juice-containing vesicles forming a pulp; pericarp thin-coriaceous to woody or fleshy; usually glandular. Seeds usually 1 per carpel; ovoid to fusiform; sometimes winged; sometimes pubescent; endosperm present or absent; sometimes with more than 1 embryo (supernumerary embryos usually spurious); seed coat membranous or firm; cotyledons white or green; flat or crumpled; hypocotyl glabrous or puberulent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: