MALVACEAE

Annual or perennial herbs, subshrubs, shrubs or rarely soft-wooded small trees, mucilaginous, usually stellate hairy. Stipules free, often caducous. Leaves alternate, petiolate, simple or palmately lobed, palminerved. Flowers axillary, terminal or leaf-opposed, solitary or in fascicles, racemes or panicles, actinomorphic, usually bisexual, 5-merous, hypogynous, often large, showy and frequently with an involucre of bracts below calyx (Epicalyx). Sepals usually 5, valvate, more or less united, usually persistent. Petals 5, free, more or less adnate at base of the staminal tube and falling off with it, twisted or imbricate. Stamens usually numerous (rarely definite), monadelphous, rarely 5-adelphous, staminal tube truncate to toothed at apex or divided into numerous filaments; anthers dorsifixed, monothecous (1-celled), usually globose or reniform, dehiscence longitudinal. Carpels 2-5-many, syncarpous, usually in a single whorl around a central axis, rarely in 2 or more, ovary 2-5- many-locular, 1-many ovules per loculus, placentation axile; style usually branched into as many as the number of carpels or sometimes twice the number of carpels or simple; stigmas usually capitate. Fruit usually capsule or schizocarp, rarely baccate (berry) or nut; usually dehiscent. Seeds with a little endosperm, reniform or obovoid, glabrous to densely hairy.

245 genera