Phytolaccaceae
A natural order of trees, shrubs, or herbs, with a woody base, usually glabrous; they are mostly tropical and sub-tropical, but a few are found in temperate regions. Flowers often greenish or white, hermaphrodite or unisexual, generally racemose, rarely axillary, very often bracteate and bibracteolate; perianth herbaceous or coriaceous, rarely membranous or coloured, four or five-parted, very rarely obconical and disk-formed, with the segments imbricated in aestivation, fruit-bearing ones persistent; petals (except in one species) wanting; stamens four or many, rarely perigynous, often inserted on a hypogynous disk; filaments filiform or subulate, free or connate at base, generally persistent; racemes terminal and axillary. Fruit of one or more carpels. Leaves alternate, entire; stipules none, or small, or reduced to tubercles. Several species of Phytolacca have economic properties, mostly acrid, vesicant, or drastic. The order, which was long confounded with Chenopodiaceae, contains nineteen genera and about sixty species. Examples: Petiveria, Phytolacca, and Rivina.