Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Often aquatic perennial herbs, glabrous or with a few simple hairs.

Stems:

Roots: Rhizomatous or stoloniferous.

Leaves: Leaves compound (pinnate) or simple. Alternate or rarely opposite. Petiolate; petiole base sometimes auriculate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in usually bractless, terminal racemes, occasionally solitary. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic or rarely slightly irregular. Calyx of 4 sepals, deciduous, ascending, the inner pair saccate at base,usually oblong, sometimes the inner 2 with gibbous bases that hold the nectar. Corolla of 4 petals, white or pale yellow, rarely tinged purple; entire to emarginate, rarely lobed or fimbriate, usually with an elongate claw. Stamens 6, tetradynamous. Ovary superior, 2(4?)-carpellate, usually 2-celled by means of a false, but usually complete septum, rarely 1-celled, sessile or rarely stipitate; ovules 1 to numerous, borne on parietal placentas on replum margin at periphery of ovary wall, campylotropous or occasionally anatropous; style 1 stout; stigma capitate, 2-lobed.

Fruit: Capsules divided into 2 cells by the usually thin and membranous septum; elongate (at least 3 times as long as wide) and referred to as a silique; linear; rounded in cross section; spreading; terete (cylindrical); with a weak median nerve; the valves extending to margins of silique; not elastic nor rolling up after dehiscence; midrib conspicuous. Seeds several in 1–2 rows per cell; suborbicular; flattened; the surface reticulate; often becoming mucilaginous when wet; endosperm essentially absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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