Vines or scandent shrubs, sometimes epiphytic; stems without anomalous vasculature; branchlets more or less terete without interpetiolar glandular fields; pseudostipules small, blunt-conical or subulate, more or less appressed against the branchlet. Leaves simple, opposite, often strikingly coriaceous. Inflores-cence an axillary raceme or a terminal or axillary (usually narrow), panicle, often conspicuously bracteate. Flowers with the calyx cupular, truncate or irregularly lobed; corolla white to pink, purple or red (or ?yellowish), tubular-campanulate to narrowly tubular, often short, more or less glabrous outside, conspicuously glandular lepidote on lobes inside; anthers glabrous, the thecae relatively short and thick, divaricate; pollen grains 3-colpate, the exine finely reticulate; ovary globose, bilocular with a single central placenta in each locule, the ovules multiseriate on each placenta, sometimes apically unilocular, the ovules then parietal on 2 bifid placentae fused lower in ovary. Fruit usually a spherical berry with a thin crustaceous pericarp, the lower part sheathed by the persistent calyx, more or less ellipsoid and hard-shelled in some species; seeds small, angu-lar, wingless, surrounded by pulp.
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