Common Name: MALLOW FAMILY
Habit: Annual to tree; generally with stellate hairs, often with bristles or peltate scales; juice generally mucilage-like; bark fibrous. Leaf: generally cauline, alternate, petioled, simple [palmate-compound], generally palmate-lobed and/or veined, generally toothed, evergreen or not; stipules persistent or not. Inflorescence: head, spike, raceme, or panicle, in panicle or not (a compound panicle), or flowers >= 1 in leaf axils, or flowers generally 1 opposite a leaf or on a spur; bracts leaf-like or not; bractlets 0 or on flowering stalks, often closely subtending calyx, generally in involucel. Flower: generally bisexual, radial; sepals 5, generally fused at base, abutting in bud, larger in fruit or not, nectaries as tufts of glandular hairs at base; petals (0)5, free from each other but generally fused at base to, falling with filament tube, clawed or not; stamens 5--many, filaments fused for most of length into tube around style, staminodes 5, alternate stamens, or generally 0; pistil 1, ovary superior, stalked or generally not, chambers generally >= 5, styles or style branches, stigmas generally 1 or 1--2 × chamber number. Fruit: loculicidal capsule, [berry], or 5--many, disk- or wedge-shaped segments (= mericarps).
Genera In Family: 266 genera, 4025 species: worldwide, especially warm regions; some cultivated (e.g., Abelmoschus okra; Alcea hollyhock; Gossypium cotton; Hibiscus hibiscus). Note: Recently treated to include Bombacaceae, Sterculiaceae, Tiliaceae. Mature fruit needed for identification; "outer edges" are surfaces between sides and back (abaxial surface) of segment. "Flower stalk" used instead of "pedicel," "peduncle," especially where both needed (i.e., when flowers both 1 in leaf axils and otherwise).
eFlora Treatment Author: Steven R. Hill, except as noted
Scientific Editor: Steven R. Hill, Thomas J. Rosatti.

Habit: Annual, perennial herb to shrub, stellate-canescent, tomentose, or bristly. Stem: generally erect (decumbent). Leaf: cordate to ovate, lobes generally 0(3), crenate or toothed. Inflorescence: panicle or flowers 1 in leaf axils; bracts leaf-like or not; involucel 0. Flower: petals yellow, yellow-orange, orange-pink, to +- red; anthers at top of filament tube; stigmas head-like. Fruit: capsule-like, +- cylindric to +- spheric, segments generally not separating fully from each other or from pl, smooth-sided, dehiscent at top, generally with beak splitting in 2, walls firm to woody. Seed: 3--6(15) per segment.
Etymology: (Arabic name, possibly from abu, father of, and Persian tula or tulha, mallow)
eFlora Treatment Author: Paul A. Fryxell & Steven R. Hill
Reference: Fryxell 1988 Syst Bot Monogr 25:24--68
Unabridged Reference: Borssum Waalkes 1966 Blumea 14:159--177