Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, occasionally subshrubs, rarely trees.

Stems: Stems often succulent or jointed, sometimes both, often mealy pubescent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple (reduced in some groups). Alternate or opposite. Blades often fleshy or succulent. Margins entire, toothed, or lobed. Usually petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in solitary or in small clusters in the leaf axils or in ± bracteate spikes, panicles, or cymes, sometimes sunken in depressions in the stem. Flowers small, usually green, usually wind–pollinated, bisexual (perfect) or occasionally unisexual (and then plants monoecious or dioecious), usually actinomorphic. Calyx of (1–)5(6) sepals, sepals herbaceous or somewhat membranous, distinct or variously connate. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens usually as many as and opposite the sepals; filaments distinct or occasionally connate at base, sometimes inserted on a circular disk or adnate to base of calyx; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior or rarely partly inferior, 2–3(–5)-carpellate, 1-celled, placentation basal; ovule 1, campylotropous and occasionally amphitropous; styles distinct or connate; stigmas dry.

Fruit: Utricle or nut; indehiscent or occasionally irregularly dehiscent or circumscissile; often subtended by the persistent calyx or persistent bracts. Seeds 1 per fruit; the surface usually lustrous; endosperm essentially absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Saline desert or semidesert areas.

Elevation Range: