Moringaceae

Abstract

Trees, sometimes with swollen, succulent trunks, or shrubs, or small woody subshrubs with tuberous rootstocks, often with smell and taste of mustard-oil glucosides; wood soft and often brittle, the bark sometimes with gum ducts. Hairs 1-cellular. Leaves petiolate, alternate, caducous but rhachis of pinnae mostly persistent, 1–3-imparipinnate; leaflets opposite, entire; stipules and stipels replaced by stipitate glands at the base of petioles and pinnae. Inflorescences axillary thyrsoids. Flowers regular to zygomorphic, hermaphroditic, white, yellow or red, with cup-like or in one species tubular, nectar-secreting receptacle. Sepals 5, much like the petals, free above the receptacle, equal or unequal, imbricate in bud. Petals 5, equal or unequal, imbricate. Fertile stamens 5, antepetalous, inserted on the margin of the disk, sometimes declinate, alternating with 3–5 staminodes; filaments free or partly adherent; anthers dorsifixed, 1-thecous, opening length-wise by a slit. Ovary superior, stipitate, cylindrical, 3-carpellate, 1-locular, with 3 parietal placentas; style terminal, slender, tubular with open canal, truncate at apex and without stigmatic lobes; ovules numerous in 2 series on each placenta, pendulous, anatropous, crassinucellate. Capsule elongate, beaked, 3-valved, 3–6-angled, sometimes torulose. Seeds unwinged or with 3 conspicuous wings, the wings hardened or membranous; embryo straight, with 2(3) cotyledons; endosperm absent. x = 14.