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Floating plants of small size, having a more or less elongated and sometimes branching axis, bearing apparently distichous leaves; sporocarps or conceptacles very soft and thin-walled, two or more on a common stalk, one-celled and having a central, often branched receptacle which bears either macrosporangia containing solitary macrospores, or microsporangia with numerous microspores.

Cotyledons 2 or 3.—Strong-scented evergreen trees, with very small and scale-like or some awl-shaped closely appressed-imbricated leaves, distichous branchlets, and exceedingly durable wood.

Less absolute characters, but generally trustworthy and more easily observed, are the feathery stigmas, the always distichous arrangement of the glumes, the usual absence of more general bracts in the inflorescence, the split leaf-sheaths, and the hollow, cylindrical, jointed culms—some or all of which are wanting in all Cyperaceae.

The branches are strictly distichous.

Spikelets are very minute, one-flowered, half immersed in the alternating distichous cavities of the rachis of the spike; rachilla is bearded.