ABSTRACT
This botanical family mainly encompasses herbaceous plants, annual, biennial, or perennial, with rarely occurring subshrubs. Their leaves are unstipulate, simple or compound, entire or divided, glabrous or hairy, arranged alternately, often opposite on flowering branches. The flowers are hermaphroditic, actinomorphic, pentamerous in arrangement, forming cymose inflorescences, axillary or terminal; solitary flowers are only rarely present. The floral envelope is gamosepalous, pentadentate, parted or laciniate, persistent or accrescent, and gamopetalous, having a campanulate, rotate, infundibuliform, or hypocrateriform corolla, pentadentate or lobed, becoming deciduous after fertilization. The androecium comprises 5 stamens fused with the corolla, each with introse anthers, bilocular and poricidal dehiscence, transversal or longitudinal. The gynoecium is composed of 2 carpels (rarely more), with a superior ovary containing numerous campylotropous or anatropous ovules attached to the thickened separating placental wall. The fruit is a berry or capsule, containing numerous albuminous seeds, reniform, compressed, with a curved or bent embryo, rarely straight. 1 - 2
