Omphalea L.

Monoecious scandent or twining shrubs or lianes or rarely trees with a simple indumentum. Leaves alternate, petiolate (often long-petiolate), stipulate, simple, entire, penninerved or palminerved, with a pair of glands at the apex of the petiole or beneath the base of the lamina. Inflorescences terminal or subterminal, appearing with the leaves or when the plant is leafless, solitary, bisexual, paniculate or occasionally racemose, pedunculate or not, with the flowers disposed in small bracteate cymules along the axes; cymules all ♂ or androgynous with a single central ♀ flower; bracts large, foliaceous or subfoliaceous, subsessile or petiolate, often biglandular at the base of the lamina; smaller bracts subtend the flowers within the cymules. Male flowers shortly pedicellate; sepals 4–5, ± free, imbricate; petals 0; disc 0 or scarcely developed; stamens 2–3, the filaments connate into a short column, the connectives broad, thick, connate into a 2–3-lobed peltate pileiform mass, the anther-thecae on the margins of the lobes, extrorse, longitudinally dehiscent; pistillode 0. Female flowers: pedicels and sepals ± as in the ♂; petals 0; disc 0 or scarcely developed; ovary 2–3-locular, with 1 ovule per locule; styles connate into a thick, obtuse or shortly 2–3-lobed column. Fruit often large, 2–3-lobed, thin-or thick-walled, dehiscing into 2–3 bivalved cocci, or else subdrupaceous and indehiscent; exocarp fleshy; endocarp woody. Seeds subglobose, not or slightly ventrally compressed, ecarunculate; testa crustaceous, ± smooth; albumen thick, fleshy; cotyledons broad, flat.