TILIACEAE  

Annual or perennial herbs, suffrutices or shrubs. Leaves simple, lobed or digitately divided, serrate or crenate, often several-nerved from base; stipules lateral. Flowers borne in cymes in terminal inflorescences or at nodes. Sepals 5, usually linear and with a short horn just behind the apex, usually stellately hairy without. Petals 5, linear to obovate, narrowed towards base, often hairy at base or just above it, yellow or orange. Stamens 4-40, raised on a short, glabrous androgynophore or torus with a glandular patch just above each petal base, apex of androgynophore produced into a ciliate or pubescent or villous disc or annulus between which and the ovary stamens arise. Ovary often tubercled or echinulate, each tubercle surmounted by one or more minute bristles; 2-5-locular with 2 pendulous collateral ovules in each locule or falsely 10-locular by the intrusion of longitudinal false septa; style terete, +/- as long as stamens; stigma entire or very shortly 2-5-lobed. Fruit a usually globose, sometimes ovoid, echinate or setose capsule, indehiscent or dividing into 2-5 valves with 1 or 2 seeds per locule. Seeds obovoid or subreniform; testa rather leathery and brown; embryo straight; cotyledons flat, suborbicular; endosperm fleshy, scanty. x = 8 (high polyploidy).

Shrubs or smallish trees. Leaves serrate, very rarely entire, 3-7-nerved at base; stipules lateral. Flowers in terminal or axillary panicles or in leaf-opposed or axillary umbel-like cymes. Sepals 5, linear-oblong or linear-spathulate, stellately hairy outside, coloured like petals within. Petals 5, shorter than sepals, yellow, pink, mauve, purplish or white, mostly with a nectariferous claw at base. Stamens indefinite, free, usually raised on a torus or androgynophore which is short and glabrous or produced above into a pubescent extension. Ovary 2-4-locular, entire or 2-4-lobed, with 2-many axile ovules in each locule; style longer than ovary with subulate or flattened lobes or almost entire. Fruit a 1-4-lobed drupe with 1-4 pyrenes; mesocarp somewhat fleshy or fibrous; endocarp hard and woody. x = 9 (polyploidy, B-chromosomes).