All the species are arborescent or shrubby, varying in size from the most stately of forest trees to the dwarfish bush.
Heavy rainfall, high temperature and fertile soil combine to cover the greater part of the state, and particularly the alluvial regions and the coast swamps, with a most luxuriant subtropical vegetation, both arborescent and herbaceous.
The polyps may be solitary, or form colonies, which may be of the spreading or encrusting type, or arborescent, and then always of monopodial growth and budding.
Solitary polyps are unknown in this sub-order; the colony may be creeping or arborescent in form; if the latter, the budding of the polyps, as already stated, is of the sympodial type, and either biserial, forming stems capable of further branching, or uniserial, forming pinnules not capable of further branching.
The nearest approach to the Stylasteridae is perhaps to be found in Ceratella, with its arborescent trophosome formed of .anastomosing coenosarcal tubes supported by a thick perisarc and covered by a common ectoderm.