Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Climbing or trailing annual or perennial herbs, rarely woody.

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

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades often palmately 3–7–lobed, or compound. Petiolate. Stipules absent; tendrils usually present, simple or 2–7–branched, stipular in position.

Flowers: Flowers in axillary or rarely terminal racemes, clusters, panicles, or heads, or solitary. Flowers usually unisexual (and the plants monoecious or dioecious), actinomorphic. Hypanthium cup–shaped, campanulate, or tubular, swelling into a globose, ellipsoid, ovoid, or spindle–shaped ovary in pistillate flowers; nectary disk sometimes present. Calyx of (3–)5 petals; petals inserted on hypanthium. Corolla of (3–)5(6) petals; petals usually yellow or white, inserted on hypanthium alternate with calyx lobes, usually connate at base, the limb often rotate. Stamens usually 5, inserted on hypanthium alternate with corolla lobes, often variously connate into 3 stamens, sometimes represented by staminodes in pistillate flowers; anthers straight, curved, or flexuous, opening by longitudinal slits.

Fruit: Fruit various; indehiscent or dehiscent; fleshy or dry; a berry; pepo; capsules; drupe; utricle; or nut. Seeds large; more or less compressed; endosperm absent; 1–seeded to many–seeded.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: