Family Basellaceae
Description: Perennial herbs with slender annual twining stems from tuber-bearing rhizomes.
Leaves alternate [or opposite, sometimes all basal], simple, entire, somewhat succulent.
Inflorescence terminal or axillary racemes or panicles. Flowers actinomorphic, mostly bisexual. Bracts 2. Perianth segments 5, free or basally fused, persistent in fruit. Stamens 5. Ovary superior, 3-carpellate, 3-lobed, 1-locular by breakdown of partitions; styles 3 or style simple and 3-lobed.
Fruit an achene, surrounded by the persistent, often fleshy corolla.
Distribution and occurrence: World: 4 genera, 15–20 species, tropical & subtropical regions, mostly America. Australia: 2 genera, 2 species.
External links:
Angiosperm Phylogeny Website (Family: Basellaceae, Order: Caryophyllales)
Wikipedia Some species are cultivated as ornamentals or as food crops in tropical regions of the world.
Text by G. J. Harden. Key by L.W. Jessup, D.J. Du Puy, R.L. Barrett, Flora of Australia Online [accessed 15 Jun. 2023], added by K.L. Gibbons 15 Jun. 2023.
Taxon concept:
| | Key to the genera | |
| 1 | Flowers pedicellate, sweetly scented, opening widely with the tepals spreading; stamens fully emergent and widely splayed, the filaments free nearly to base, markedly dilated in basal half, the anthers dorsifixed; tepals not fleshy | Anredera |
| Flowers sessile, unscented, scarcely opening, the tepals remaining closely cupped; stamens straight-erect, not emergent, the filaments adnate for half their length to tepals, not dilated in free portion, the anthers basifixed; tepals fleshy | Basella |
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