Description:

• Subsucculent perennial herbs with slender to fairly robust twining stems, usually glabrous, decumbent to procumbent, often renewed from tubers or thickened, ± woody stem bases; roots fibrous or often ± thickened; plant mucilaginous, lacking anomalous secondary growth and anthocyanins
• Leaves alternate, simple, lanceolate to broadly elliptic, cordate or obovate, entire, with ± thin margin, usually petiolate, somewhat fleshy; stipules 0
• Inflorescences axillary or terminal bracteate spikes, racemes or panicles, indeterminate or pseudodeterminate; bracts small, thin, deciduous or persistent, lanceolate to triangular, subtending a pedicel or sessile flower; bracteoles 2-4, frequently subtending flower
• Flowers bisexual, rarely functionally unisexual, regular, small
• Sepals 2, coloured, free to base or partly connate
• Petals 5, membranous or fleshy, with short tube and persistent, imbricate lobes
• Stamens 5, epipetalous, connate at base and adnate to corolla lobes; anthers included or exserted, dorsifixed or basifixed, 2-thecous, extrorsely dehiscent by longitudinal slits, whitish, yellowish, reddish, or violet
• Ovary superior, 3-carpellate, 1-locular; ovule solitary, basal, bitegmic, amphitropous to campylotropous; style 1, 3-partite ± to middle or almost to base, sometimes persistent; stigmas linear to capitate
• Fruit a thin-walled nutlet, globose to ± obliquely pyriform, smooth to ribbed, surrounded by persistent perianth
• Seed nearly spherical, with membranous testa; embryo ring-like to spirally twisted

Nomenclature:

• Basellaceae
  • Moquin-Tandon: 10 (1840)
  • Hooker: 43 (1880)
  • Volkens: 124 (1893)
  • Franz: 1 (1908)
  • Ulbrich: 263 (1934)
  • Sperling & Bittrich: 143 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Genera 4, species ± 20, mainly in tropical and subtropical South America but also in Africa and Asia
• Southern Africa: Genera 2 (1 exotic), species 2

References:

• FRANZ, E. 1908. Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Portulacaceen und Basellaceen. Botanische Jahrbücher 42, Beiblatt 97
• HOOKER, J.D. 1880. Chenopodiaceae. In G. Bentham & J.D. Hooker, Genera plantarum 3,1. Lovell Reeve & Co., London
• MOQUIN-TANDON, C.H.B.A. 1840. Chenopodearum monographica enumeratio. P.-J. Loss, Paris
• SPERLING, C.R. & BITTRICH, V. 1993. Basellaceae. In K. Kubitzki, J.G. Rohwer & V. Bittrich, The families and genera of vascular plants - dicotyledons 2. Springer-Verlag, Berlin
• ULBRICH, O.E. 1934. Basellaceae. Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien 2,16c
• VOLKENS, G. 1893. Basellaceae. Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien 3,1a

Resources:

• Key to Basellaceae genera

• Basellaceae genera: