ONAGRACEAE 1. LUDWIGIA Linnaeus, Sp
ONAGRACEAE 柳叶菜科 liu ye cai ke Chen Jiarui (陈家瑞 Chen Chia-jui)1; Peter C. Hoch2, Peter H. Raven2, David E. Boufford3, Warren L. Wagner4 Annual or perennial herbs, or shrubs, rarely trees to 30 m tall, often with epidermal oil cells, usually with internal phloem. Leaves simple, spirally arranged, opposite, or occasionally whorled, entire or toothed to pinnatifid; stipules present and usually caducous, or absent. Flowers perfect and hermaphroditic or occasionally unisexual, actinomorphic or zygomorphic, (2–)4(–7)- merous, axillary, in leafy spikes or racemes or solitary, or occasionally in panicles, all but Ludwigia with distinct floral tube, nectariferous within. Sepals green or colored, valvate. Petals as many as sepals or rarely absent, variously colored, imbricate or convolute and occasionally clawed. Stamens as many as sepals in one series or 2 × as many as sepals in 2 series [in Lopezia Cavanil- les reduced to 2 or 1 plus 1 sterile staminode]; anthers versatile or basifixed, dithecal, sometimes cross-partitioned, opening by longitudinal slits; pollen grains almost always united by viscin threads, shed as monads, tetrads, or polyads. Ovary inferior, with as many carpels and locules as sepals, septa sometimes thin or absent at maturity; placentation axile or parietal, ovules 1 to many per locule, in 1 or several rows or clustered, anatropous, bitegmic; style 1; stigma with as many lobes as sepals or clavate to globose. Fruit a loculicidal capsule or indehiscent nut or berry. Seeds small, smooth or variously sculptured, sometimes with a coma [or wing], with straight oily embryo, endosperm lacking. Seventeen genera and ca. 650 species: widespread in temperate and subtropical areas, but best represented in W North America; six genera (two introduced), 64 species (11 endemic, 11 introduced), and five natural hybrids (two endemic) in China.
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