Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees or shrubs, usually with hard, dark red or black wood, pubescence usually of simple hairs, sometimes the hairs branched or glandular.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or rarely opposite. Margins entire. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in solitary or in small cymose clusters in the leaf axils. Flowers usually small, usually unisexual (and the plants usually dioecious or sometimes monoecious), actinomorphic. Calyx 3–7-lobed, usually accrescent and persistent. Corolla 3–7-lobed, the lobes imbricate, convolute, or valvate. Stamens usually twice as many as corolla lobes and in 2 series, occasionally 4–5 times as many as corolla lobes and often paired, rarely as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits or rarely by apical pores; pistillate flowers often only with staminodes. Ovary superior, vestigial in staminate flowers, (2)3–8(–10)-carpellate, with as many cells, each carpel often divided by a central partition so that there are twice as many cells as carpels, placentation apical-axile; ovules 1(2) per cell, pendulous, anatropous or apotropous; styles 2–8, usually 4, nearly distinct to connate.

Fruit: Fruit usually a juicy to leathery or chartaceous berry; rarely a capsules. Seeds fewer than ovules; seed coat thin; endosperm copious and hard.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: