The overall morphology of these plants is highly reduced compared to other members of the Ericaceae, which are practically all subshrubs, shrubs, or trees.

(If the Pyroleae are included, many of these species are partially photosythentic, and have green vegetative tissue, though leaves are usually reduced to a basal rosette.

[4] The monotropes were first described as a distinct plant family by Thomas Nuttall in 1818, when he united the Linnean genus Monotropa with his newly authored genus and species Pterospora andromedea as the family Monotropeae (changed by later authors to Monotropaceae when modern rules of naming plant taxa were developed).

[2] David Don was the first to recognize this group as a tribe within the Ericaceae, later raised to subfamily status as the Monotropoideae by Asa Gray in 1878.

Over the next century, authors have variously treated this group as a distinct family or as a subfamily of the Ericaceae, though the trend from Margaret W. Henderson (1919) onward was toward the latter subfamily classification, albeit, the influential Cronquist and Dahlgren systems continued to treat the group as the family Monotropaceae, separate from the Ericaceae.

[13][15] The parasitism by these plants is generally very specific in terms of its fungal hosts, ranging from single families of fungi, to a few closely related species.

[2] Several floral scent compounds of Monotropastrum humile, linalool, α-terpineol, and geraniol, have been demonstrated to be bumble bee attractants.

The center of biodiversity for this subfamily is found in temperate western North America, along the northern and central California and Pacific Northwest coast and montane areas as far east as the Sierra Nevada-Cascade cordillera.