Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, sometimes shrubs or trees.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, opposite, or occasionally whorled. Margins entire, toothed, or pinnatifid. Sessile or subsessile to petiolate. Stipules present and usually quickly deciduous or absent.

Flowers: Flowers in the axils of usually reduced upper leaves or occasionally in leafy, bracted spikes, racemes, or panicles. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or occasionally unisexual, actinomorphic or zygomorphic. Calyx of (2–)4–5(–7) sepals; sepals green or colored, valvate. Petals usually as many as sepals, rarely absent. Stamens as many or twice as many as sepals and in two series, the one opposite the petals sometimes reduced to 2 or, in Lopezia Cav. to 1 fertile and one staminode; anthers versatile or basifixed, dithecal, sometimes cross–partitioned, opening by longitudinal slits. Pollen grains almost always united by viscin threads, shed singly or in tetrads.

Fruit: Loculicidal capsules; sometimes indehiscent and nut-like; or in Fuchsia; a berry. Seeds small; smooth or variously papillose; sometimes with a coma or wings; endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: