Cissampelos pareira Illustration Credit: M.Y. Saleem

Suberect or twining dioecious shrubs. Leaves simple, cordate or reniform, peltate, emarginate. Flowers in axillary racemes or cymose clusters. Male flowers: cymose, sepals 4(-5), obovate; petals 4, connate, forming a cup, or sometimes incompletely connate; anthers 4, connate on a staminal column or disc, dehiscing transversely. Female flowers: cymules 3-9-flowered, axillary or in false racemes arising in the axils of leaves or accrescent bracts; sepals 1, rarely more; petals 1, rarely 2 or 3, adnate to the bracts; staminodes 0; carpel 1; style 1, short, trifid. Fruit a subglobose drupe with hairy or glabrous exocarp, a fleshy and thin mesocarp, and a dorsally compressed, tubercled and transversely ribbed endocarp. Seeds curved, albumen ruminate.

A genus with about 30 species distributed over subtropical and tropical regions. Represented by only 1 species in Pakistan.

Lower Taxon

• Cissampelos pareira Linn.

Related Synonym(s):

• Cissampelos hirsuta DC. = Cissampelos pareira Linn.
• Cissampelos pareira* sensu Hook. f. & Thoms. = Cissampelos pareira Linn.