Annual or perennial herbs to shrubs or small trees, mucilaginous, pubescent. Leaves petiolate, stipulate, alternate or spirally arranged, simple, entire, lobed or parted. Flowers axillary, solitary, or in fascicles, racemes or panicles, sessile or pedicellate, bracteate or ebracteate, actinomorphic, usually bisexual, pentamerous. Calyx, free or connate, valvate, usually persistent; sepals (3-) 5 (-6). Corolla free, adnate at the base to the staminal tube and falling off with it, twisted; petals 5. Stamens usually numerous, monadelphous, staminal tube truncate to toothed at apex or divided into numerous filaments; anthers dorsifixed, monothecous, longitudinally dehiscent; pollen grains large, echinate. Carpels (2-) 5-many, usually in a single whorl, sometimes in 2 or more whorls; ovary (2-) 5-many loculed, each locule 1-many ovuled, placentation axile; style usually branched into as many as the number of carpels or sometimes twice the number of carpels or simple. Fruit a dry capsule or schizocarp, rarely baccate, usually dehiscent. Seeds with a little endosperm, reniform or obovoid, glabrous to densely hairy; embryo usually curved, sometimes straight; cotyledons folded or crumpled.