Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees, shrubs, or sometimes lianas, glabrous to variously pubescent.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite and decussate (pairs of leaves alternating 90 degrees between nodes) or whorled. Margins entire or variously dentate. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in usually open, determinate cymes, occasionally in dense or subcapitate cymes or heads, each flower +/- bracteolate. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx campanulate or rarely tubular, entire to 5-toothed, often accrescent, petaloid and same color as corolla or strongly contrasting and red, white, or green, splitting longitudinally, usually persistent or sometimes only ventral 1/2 persistent. Corolla nearly actinomorphic or slightly irregular, usually white, blue, violet, or red, salverform or funnelform, slightly to greatly exceeding the calyx, 5-lobed, the lobes subequal; nectary disk often present at base of ovary, annular or developed on anterior side only. Stamens 4(5), in 2 pairs, inserted on corolla tube and usually long–exserted, aligned with the sinuses; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, occasionally 1 theca reduced or absent or the 2 thecae confluent, occasionally the connective elongate and thus separating the thecae. Ovary superior, rarely on a gynophore, 4-celled; ovules 1 per cell, attached laterally; style arising between lobes, placentation basal-axile; ovules 1 per ovary lobe, anatropous to hemitropous or apotropous; style 1, usually cleft; stigmas 2, sometimes 1 reduced and vestigial.

Fruit: Fruit drupaceous; globose or obovoid; weakly 4–lobed; separating at maturity into 4 pyrenes or sometimes cohering in pairs; subtended or enclosed by the persistent calyx; exocarp ± fleshy; endocarp bony or crustaceous. Seeds oblong; with endosperm absent or scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: