2024 Edition • Get the App • Cite this Page
X

Colors

Data mode

Account

Login
Sign up

Collapse this

Support the Flora of the Southeastern US

2024 has been a banner year for making the best flora we can imagine. We've created:
With financial support from people like you, we are aiming even higher in 2025. Together we can accomplish all this: Vote on our 2025 priorities
  • Add Global Conservation Ranks (GRanks) vote
  • Professional graphic keys (polyclaves) to individual families/genera vote
  • 2 new FloraQuest apps: Florida & Mid-South vote
  • Image overlays highlighting diagnostic characters with arrows vote
  • iNaturalist integration in FloraQuest vote
Write-in vote: vote
We've set a goal of recruiting 200 ongoing supporters to donate $15 or more each month in 2025. Please help us reach this goal and make next year's flora even better:
Donate $15 per month
(0.9¢/key)
Donate $30 per month
(1.8¢/key)
Donate $50 per month
(amazing!)
Donate another
or one-time amount

Click the number at the start of a key lead to highlight both that lead and its corresponding lead. Click again to show only the two highlighted leads. Click a third time to return to the full key with the selected leads still highlighted.

Key to Lythraceae

Copy permalink to share

1 Plant woody or suffrutescent, a shrub or a small tree 1-10 m tall; petals present, showy, 8-20 mm long.
image of plant
Show caption*© Scott Ward
image of plant
Show caption*© Erik Danielson
  2 Aquatic shrubs with arching suffrutescent or woody stems; leaves opposite or whorled; [native]
  2 Terrestrial shrubs or small trees with erect woody stems; leaves alternate to subopposite; [exotics cultivated and sometimes persistent].
    3 Flowers in many-flowered terminal or axillary cymose panicles; fruit a loculicidal capsule
    3 Flowers solitary or several in terminal or axillary clusters; fruit a leathery berry (pomegranate)
1 Plant not woody, an herb 0.1-1.2 m tall; petals absent or present, inconspicuous or showy, 1-10 mm long.
image of plant
Show caption*© Steven Daniel, all rights reserved, uploaded by Steven Daniel
      4 Fruit with 2-4 prominent spines; leaves coarsely toothed
      4 Fruit not spinose; leaves entire.
image of plant
Show caption*© Sonnia Hill
        5 Stems pubescent.
          6 Floral tube (hypanthium) swollen obliquely at its base; capsule dehiscing longitudinally along the upper surface
          6 Floral tube (hypanthium) symmetrical; capsule dehiscing septicidally at the apex
        5 Stems glabrous.
             7 Floral tube cylindric to turbinate, about 2× as long as wide
             7 Floral tube campanulate to globose, about 1× long as wide.
               8 Flowers or fruits (1-) 3-10 in the leaf axils (at least some axils with 2 or more flowers or fruits on a given plant)
               8 Flowers or fruits solitary in the leaf axils (never > 1 per axil).
                 9 Capsule indehiscent; petals 0; sepals 4, broadly triangular, lacking intersepalary appendages; seeds spatulate or oblanceolate, about 1 mm long, minutely granular on one face and smooth on the other
                 9 Capsule dehiscing septicidally; petals 0 or 4; sepals 4 (-6), triangular, with intersepalary appendages of size about equal to the calyx lobes; seeds hemispheric, about 0.3 mm long, the surface very finely reticulate