Moraceae

1 Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Heilongtan, Kunming, Yunnan 650204, People’s Republic of China. 2 Missouri Botanical Garden, c/o Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 3AE, England, United Kingdom. Trees, shrubs, vines, or rarely herbs, frequently with milky or watery latex, sometimes spiny. Stipules present, frequently caducous. Leaves alternate, rarely opposite; petiole often present and well-defined; leaf blade simple, sometimes with cystoliths, margin entire or palmately lobed, venation pinnate or palmate. Inflorescences axillary, frequently paired, racemose, spicate, capitate, or rarely cymose, sometimes a fig or syconium with flowers completely enclosed within a hollow receptacle. Flowers unisexual (plants monoecious or dioecious), small to very small. Calyx lobes (1 or)2–4(–8), free or connate, imbricate or valvate. Corolla absent. Male flowers: stamens as many as and opposite to calyx lobes (except in Artocarpus), straight or inflexed in bud; anthers 1or 2-loculed, crescent-shaped to top-shaped; pistillode (rudimentary sterile pistil) often present. Female flowers: calyx lobes usually 4; ovary superior, semi-inferior, or inferior, 1(or 2)-loculed; ovules 1 per locule, anatropous or campylotropous; style branches 1 or 2; stigmas usually filiform. Fruit usually a drupe, rarely an achene, enveloped by an enlarged calyx and/or immersed in a fleshy receptacle, often joined into a syncarp. Seed solitary; endosperm present or absent.