Abstract
Perennial herbs, either with ascending or creeping pachycaulous stems, covered with large leaf scars, apically with large to gigantic, long-petioled leaves reaching up to c. 5 m in height (G. magnifica), and between these often covered with conspicuous bracts protecting the inflorescence and vegetative buds, or stoloniferous and mat-forming, with short, upright stem portions bearing leaf-rosettes, reachingfrom4 cm to about 1 m in height, or in one case (G. herteri), diminutive annuals. Leaves alternate, crowded at stem tips; petioles short to very long; lamina oblong to reniform or peltate, dentate, crenate or palmately lobed, the crenations and lobes with protruding hydathodes; venation in large-leaved species palinactinodromous with veins very prominent and projecting as ribs on abaxial surface, in smaller-leaved species actinodromous or pinnate and less prominent. Sometimes with more or less conspicuous, simple to much divided scales between the leaf-bases, stolons with paired, or single ochrea-like, bracts apically. Inflorescences axillary or pseudoterminal, erect, simple or compound racemes, or spikes; lower flowers mostly pistillate, upper ones staminate, the middle ones sometimes perfect, or flowers all unisexual, in a few cases plants dioecious. Flowers small, bracteate or not, epigynous, sepals 2, anteri-posterior, valvate, sometimes obsolete, petals 2, transversal, mitre-shaped, slightly exceeding the sepals, caducous, in female flowers wanting; stamens 2(1), transversal, with short filaments; anthers dithecal and tetrasporangiate, opening by longitudinal slits; carpels2, united to form an inferior, unilocular ovary; stylodia 2, transversal; stigmas dry, papillate; ovule solitary, pendulous from apex of locule. Fruit drupaceous, coriaceous to fleshy, oval to globose, green or bright red, rarely white or yellow. Seeds with a very small obcordate embryo embedded in copious, oily endosperm. Specialized organs containing endosymbiontic Nostoc cells are located in the stem between the leaf-bases of all species.
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Wilkinson, H.P., Wanntorp, L. (2007). Gunneraceae. In: Kubitzki, K. (eds) Flowering Plants · Eudicots. The Families and Genera of Vascular Plants, vol 9. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32219-1_21
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