Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Monoecious, climbing or trailing annual or perennial herbs, sometimes woody at base, glabrate or variously pubescent.

Stems: Usually scabrid with short rigid hairs, sometimes hairs multicellular or glandular.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades 3–7–angled to palmately or rarely palmately 3–9 lobed. Petiolate. Stipules absent; tendrils in the stipular position 2–5–branched.

Flowers: Flowers in staminate flowers numerous in racemes or panicles, the branches often whorled; pistillate flowers 2–65 in pedunculate heads. Flowers usually unisexual (and the plants monoecious or dioecious), actinomorphic. Calyx of 5 sepals, inserted on hypanthium. Corolla of staminate flowers with (4)5 petals inserted on hypanthium and alternate with calyx lobes, usually connate at base, the limb often rotate; Corolla of pistillate flowers 3–5(6)-lobed, perianth usually smaller than in staminate flowers. Stamens in staminate flower 3; filaments connate into a column; anthers distinct, 2 of them dithecal, the other monothecal, cells flexuous; anthers opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior, of a single carpel or 3-carpellate with carpels connate into a single 3-lobed cell; ovule 1, placentation parietal, pendulous; stigma 3-lobed.

Fruit: Fruit indehiscent or dehiscent; usually a dry to firm–fleshy utricle or nut; rarely a drupe; aggregated into head-like infructescences of 2–65; sometimes attenuate into a beak; angled; ribbed; glabrous; spiny; bristly; or variously pubescent. Seeds 1 per fruit; ovate; more or less compressed; endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: