Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees or large shrubs up to 30 m tall, with soft, brittle wood, or more rarely (outside hawai'i) woody, spiny climbers.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite or more rarely subopposite, pseudo–whorled, or whorled. Margins entire to sinuate. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in more or less corymbiform, terminal or axillary pedunculate cymes, these compact to very open, ± with small scale-like bracts at nodes, usually 1 to several minute bracts at bases of pedicels or of the sessile flowers. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or unisexual (and then plants dioecious or monoecious), staminate flowers usually with campanulate perianth, lobes valvate in bud, stamens ca. 6–26, often unequal in 2 series, shorter and longer, connate at base around a small pistillode; pistillate flowers with a tubular 4–5– lobed perianth, staminodes with reduced anthers and short filaments, ovary superior, 1-celled, ovule 1, style 1, usually longer than perianth, stigma penicillate or fimbriate, sometimes papillate; bisexual (perfect) flowers (at least in Hawai'i) with tubular, scarcely lobed perianth, limb–funnelform and plicate, stigma papillate or puberulent. Calyx tubular 5-parted. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens 6-10. Ovary superior, sessile, oblique; stigma capitate or lobed.

Fruit: Anthocarps formed of entire perianth; clavate or prismatic and tapering; sulcate or angled; ridges very viscid; in some species with spine-like stipitate glands; upper part of anthocarp often tubular and often prolonged; narrowed and beak-like; lobes persistent. Seeds 1 per fruit; closely enclosed by the thin ovary wall.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: