Plants herbs, shrubs, trees, or woody climbers, leaves and stems usually with stiff hairs. Leaves usually alternate, rarely some opposite, without stipules, simple. Inflorescences usually helicoid or scorpioid cymes, sometimes aggregated into panicle-like inflorescences. sometimes of solitary flowers. Flowers usually bisexual, sometimes uinisexual, (4-)5-merous, usally radially, sometimes bilaterally, symmetric; calyx lobes usually imricate, rarely valvate; corollas salverform, tubular, funnel-shaped, campanulate, or rotate, corolla tubes often with scales or doled in the thrat, limbs with imbricate or contorted lobes' stamens inserted on the corolla tubes, alternating with the lobes, exserted or included; anthers with 2 thecae, opening by longitudinal slits; nectary disks often present around the ovary bases; ovaries superior, entire or deeply 4-lobed, 2- or 4-celle through development of seconday partitions; ovules 4; styles 1 or 2, if 1 simple or 2-4-fid, often attached near the base of the ovaries. Fruits varying from drupaceous with 1-4 stones, or with 2 2-seeded stones, or 4 1-seeded stones, or splitting into 4 nutlets, or 1-2 seeded capsules.; seeds with or without endsperm.
The family Boraginaceae includes about 100 genera and 2000 species and is cosmopolitan in its distribution. This treatment includes the old Hydrophyllaceae, in wich the fruits are capsules, because it is nested with Boraginaceae, as well as some other groups formerly recognized as families.