Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Plants dioecious or monoecious, rarely polygamous.

Stems: Stems soft-wooded, usually unbranched with a leafy apex.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades palmately lobed. Palmately veined. Long-petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in staminate flowers numerous, pendulous, in long–pedunculate, branched cymes; pistillate flowers 1–3 in short–pedunculate clusters; perfect flowers similar to pistillate ones but in slightly more delicate clusters. bracts small or absent. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or unisexual (and then plants dioecious or sometimes monoecious). Calyx small. Corolla slender, tubular, the tube very short in pistillate flowers, corolla tubular. Stamens 5 or 10, in 1-2 series, 5 opposite the calyx lobes, sessile or nearly so, the others on short filaments, staminodes absent, rarely present and minute in pistillate flowers; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 5-carpellate, 1-celled or 5-celled, rudimentary in staminate flowers; ovules in 2 to several rows on each placenta; style short or absent; stigmas 5, linear to variously divided; placentation parietal; ovules numerous, anatropous; stigmas 5.

Fruit: Berries small to very large and melon-like. Seeds numerous; ovoid; arillate; the surface smooth to rugose or prickly. Seeds with soft; fleshy endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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