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Foliage leaves: petioles c. 1 mm long; stipules resembling those of the scale leaves; blades 0.5–4.5 × 0.1–0.3 cm, linear to linear-lanceolate or occasionally elliptic-lanceolate, acute, subacute or obtuse, usually ± rounded at the base, membranaceous, smooth or minutely scaberulous along the midrib and main nerves beneath, green above, glaucous beneath, occasionally pinkish-tinged; lateral nerves in 4–6 pairs, widely spaced, the lower free, the upper looping, indistinct above, faint and scarcely prominent beneath.
Female flowers: pedicels 1–1.5 mm long, extending to 2–3(4) mm in fruit, ± smooth; sepals 5, unequal, the 3 outer slightly larger than those of the male flowers, but otherwise similar; disk 1 mm in diameter, annular, shallowly saucer-shaped, thin, smooth; ovary 0.67 mm in diameter, sessile, subglobose, smooth; styles 3, 0.33 mm long, ± free, closely appressed to the top of the ovary, shortly bifid.
Male flowers: pedicels 0.5 mm long; sepals 5, 0.67 × 0.67 mm, obovate-suborbicular, apiculate, white, cream-coloured or greenish-white with a red or pinkish midrib; disk glands 5, free, 0.4 mm across, transversely ovate, ± truncate, thin, flat, smooth; stamens 5, 0.5 mm long, usually free, anthers 0.2 mm across, horizontally held, laterally dehiscent, yellow.
Seeds 0.9–1 × 0.8 × 0.8 mm, segmentiform, pale yellowish-brown or greyish, shiny, with 8–10 rows of darker brown tubercles on the dorsal facet, and 7–9 concentric arcs of such tubercles on each ventral facet, the tubercles connected by a lattice of shallow ridges.
Flowers commonly in few-flowered bisexual cymes with 1–3 male flowers and 1 female flower per cyme, or else male flowers in unisexual cymes in the lower axils of the lateral shoots, and female flowers solitary in the upper axils.
A delicate, erect or decumbent glabrous or minutely scaberulous annual or subperennial herb up to 60 cm tall, monoecious; stem little-branched at first but later becoming much-branched and woody at the base.
Erect, annual herb, up to 360 mm tall. Flowering branches conspicuously flexuous. Leaves oblong-lanceolate or linear-lanceolate, thin, glabrous on both surfaces. Flowers yellowish red.
Scale leaves 1 mm long, linear-lanceolate; stipules 1 mm long, narrowly triangular-lanceolate, often reddish-tinged.
Flowers white, small, males 2–3 together in the lower axils on the branchlets
Fruit 1.2 × 2 mm, depressed-subglobose, smooth, olivaceous.
A glabrous, much-branched woody herb, up to 18 in. high
Lateral leafy and flowering shoots 5–20 cm long.
Lead shoots terete, zigzag, pale green.
Females solitary in the upper axils.
