RHAMNACEAE

Tree and shrubs, erect, scandent, or climbing, lianas, rarely vines or herbs, sometimes armed, sometimes with bud scales. Leaves simple, alternate or opposite, or fasciculate on short-shoots, sometimes (not Nicaragua) reduced to absent, venation pinnate, sometimes with proximal pair of lateral veins from base, or less frequently 3 or 5 palmately-veined, often with glands, margin entire to serrate; stipules usually present, caducous to persistent, sometimes fused intrapetiolarly, small to large, unlobed or often lobed in Gouania; petioles usually present, often with a marked line of abscission. Inflorescences usually axillary, but sometimes terminal or terminal and axillary, basically composed of cymes or flowers fascicled, the cymes sometimes corymbose, umbelliform, racemose, simple or compound, sometimes arranged in panicles or thyrses, sometimes reduced to one flower, pedunculate or sessile. Flowers small (3—6 mm in diameter Medan & Schirarend, 2004), bisexual or unisexual (plants sometime dioecious), usually protandrous, actinomorphic, in Mesoamerica 5-merous except 4-merous in Rhamnus elsewhere sometimes 3, 6 or 8-merous, usually dull-colored (white, green, yellow), rarely brightly colored (in Mesoamerica blue, Ceanothus); usually pedicellate but sometimes sessile (Sageretia, in Nicaragua). Hypanthium patelliform to tubular or funnelform (elsewhere sometimes absent), at the rim bearing sepals, petals and stamens, sometimes apical portion fusing to and dehiscing with fruit (Colubrina), sometimes circumscissile (Frangula). Sepals valvate in bud, usually with adaxial keel. Petals rarely absent (Krugiodendron in Nicaragua), usually less conspicuous than the sepals, often concave and/or hooded and folded around stamens at anthesis (or throughout flowering around staminodes in functionally unisexual taxa), usually differentiated into limb and claw. Stamens in one whorl, opposite petals, filaments linear or wider towards base, anthers longitudinally dehiscent; Gouania with chartaceous disk lobes (possibly staminodial in origin) opposite the sepals. Disc intrastaminal, nectiferous, thin to fleshy, entire to crenulate, hypogynous to epigynous, sometimes fused to and dehiscing with fruit (Colubrina). Ovary inferior to superior, or frequently difficult to define as either and position changing relative to other floral part as fruit develops, (1) 2—4-locular with 1 or 2 ovules per locules, the locules sometimes only partially separated. Fruits more or less fleshy drupes with 1—4 usually indehiscent, or less frequently dehiscent stones (Sageretia in Nicaragua); or dry and capsular and the mesocarp and epicarp, dehiscing with the endocarpids, or breaking and falling irregularly (Ceanothus and Colubrina in Nicaragua) or schizocarps (with three two winged mericarps in Nicaragua, Gouania). Seeds 1—4 per stone, or 1 per mericarp or endocarpid; endosperm usually poorly developed or absent (in Nicaragua); cotyledons flat or convex. 

14. Flores con pedicels de 1 mm o más de largo; todas las hojas alternas