Frankeniaceae

Abstract

Halophytic shrubs, subshrubs or herbs. Leaves opposite, simple, often small and ericoid and revolute-margined, commonly punctate with sunken, salt-excreting glands, exstipulate, leaf pairs united by a common sheath. Flowers small, in axillary dichasia or forming dense leafy cymes, or solitary, hypogynous, regular, usually perfect, subtended by 2 prophylls and usually with a pair of additional bracts; sepals 4–7, connate into a tube with short, induplicate-valvate lobes; petals 4–7, distinct, imbricate, clawed, usually with a scale-like appendage inside; nectary disk wanting; stamens 3–6(-25), mostly 6 in 2 whorls, distinct or shortly connate at the base, with filiform or flattened filaments, rarely inner cycle staminodial; anthers versatile, opening length-wise; gynoecium of (1-)3(4) carpels united to form a unilocular ovary with as many parietal (sometimes intruded) or parietal-basal placentas as carpels, or sometimes with a strictly basal placenta; style slender and elongate, usually with distinct stylodia; ovules (1)2–6(-many) on each placenta, anatropous, with a more or less elongate funiculus. Fruit a loculicidal/apicidal capsule, enclosed in the persistent calyx; seeds smooth and glabrous, or papillose or puberulent, with a central, straight embryo flanked on both sides by the abundant, starchy endosperm. x = 10, 15.