Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs or sometimes small trees, often with thorns, densely lepidote or stellate pubescent.

Stems:

Roots:

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

Flowers: Flowers in racemes or small umbels, sometimes solitary in the leaf axils. Flowers bisexual (perfect), or unisexual (and plants dioecious). Calyx of (2)4(6) sepals; sepals often petaloid, appearing as lobes on a tubular hypanthium in pistillate flowers or saucer-shaped in staminate flowers. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens inserted on throat of hypanthium, as many as and alternate with the sepals, sometimes twice as many as sepals; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits.

Fruit: Dry achenes; but appearing drupaceous; enclosed by persistent base of hypanthium; which becomes fleshy. Seeds 1 per fruit; endosperm scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: