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–)3–5 sepals or absent, scarious or membranous, distinct or connate at base. 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, 2–3(4)-carpellate, the carpels connate to form a compound, 1-celled ovary; ovule placentation basal, free-central, or rarely apical; style 1, often lobed.

Fruit: Fruit a utricle; nut; or circumscissile; 1–seeded capsules sometimes breaking open irregularly; rarely a berry; often enclosed by the persistent calyx. Seeds 1 per fruit; the surface usually lustrous; endosperm essentially absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Saline desert or semidesert areas.

Elevation Range: