Q.Describe the salient vegetative and floral characters of family Solanaceae, giving its floral formula and its economic importance.

Solanaceae, popularly called the 'potato family', is a large, widely distributed family of herbs, shrubs and occasionally small trees. The stem is usually herbaceous and aerial, though it is modified into an underground storage tuber in potato. Leaves are alternate, simple (rarely pinnately compound), without stipules, and show reticulate venation.

The flower is solitary or borne in a cyme, actinomorphic and bisexual. The calyx has five sepals fused together (gamosepalous), persistent even in fruit, with valvate aestivation. The corolla likewise has five petals fused into a tube (gamopetalous), also valvate, typically funnel- or wheel-shaped. The androecium has exactly five stamens, equal in number to the petals, epipetalous (attached to the corolla tube) and alternating with the petals. The gynoecium is the family's most distinctive feature: two carpels fused together (bicarpellary, syncarpous) forming a superior ovary that is placed obliquely on the floral axis rather than straight, bilocular, with a swollen placenta bearing numerous ovules on axile placentation. The fruit is either a many-seeded berry (as in tomato and brinjal) or a capsule (as in Datura). …

Cover vegetative characters first, then go whorl by whorl for the flower (leading with the diagnostic oblique bicarpellary ovary), then list the fruit type an …

• Forgetting that the ovary's oblique placement (not just 'bicarpellary, axile') is the specific detail that makes Solanaceae's gynoecium recognisable. …