Botanical Survey of India | Flora of India

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TAMARICACEAE
B.V.Shetty,R.P. Pandey



Shrubs, undershrubs or trees with slender, flexuous branches, rarely herbs, halophytic or xerophytic. Leaves usually small, often scale-like, alternate, simple, exstipulate, usually sessile, sometimes sheathing, rarely subsessile, generally fleshy and with punctate salt secreting glands. Flowers in racemes, panicles, spike-like racemes or spikes, sometimes solitary, actinomorphic, bisexual or rarely unisexual with plants dioecious, hypogynous. Sepals 4 - 5 (- 6), free or connate at base, imbricate, persistent. Petals 4 - 5 (- 6), free, imbricate, persistent, subpersistent or caducous. Stamens 4 - 10 (-14) or numeorus, inserted on or below the disc, free or basally connate, united up to middle or above, or in 5 bundles, persistent, subpersistent or caducous; anthers 2-loculed, dehiscing longitudinally. Pistil 1; ovary (2 -) 3 - 4 (- 5)-carpelled, unilocular or imperfectly septate, with parietal or basal or parietal-basal placentation, ovules 2 - many on each placenta, anatropous; styles (2 -) 3 - 4 (- 5), free or rarely basally connate or absent; stigmas capitate. Fruit a capsule, pyramidal or bottle-shaped, 3 - 5 -angled and valved, dehiscing down to the base. Seeds erect with a coma of long, unicellular hairs at distal end or covered all over with long hairs; embryo straight; endosperm absent or present; cotyledons flat.

Chiefly in the temperate and subtropical regions of Europe, Africa and Asia; 4 genera and ca 90 species; 3 genera with 16 species in India.

Literature. QAlSER, M. (1982). Tamaricaceae. In: NASIR, E. & S. I. ALI, Fl.W. Pakistan 141: 1-65.



KEY TO THE GENERA


1a. Stamens connate to half or more of their length 1. Myricaria
b. Stamens free 2
2a. Leaves normal; styles absent; seeds with stipitate coma 2. Myrtama
b. Leaves reduced and scale-like; styles distinct; seeds with sessile coma 3. Tamarix


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