Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Subshrubs or perennial herbs, pubescence various, the hairs stellate and sometimes simple.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades ovate to transverse-elliptic in outline, usually palmately angled, lobed, or divided. Base truncate to cordate or cuneate. Lower surfaces with a bordered gland on midrib and sometimes adjacent adjacent veins near base. Margins serrate to crenate. Petioles usually shorter than blades. Stipules obscure, caducous.

Flowers: Flowers solitary or glomerate in the leaf axils or in spicate or racemose inflorescences by reduction of upper leaves, pedicels short, not articulate; involucral bracts 5, linear-subulate to narrowly oblong, connate basally, alternate with the 5 calyx lobes. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx tubular to campanulate, composed of connate sepals, (3-)5-toothed or (3-)5-lobed, sometimes irregularly cleft or truncate, the lobes valvate in bud. Corolla actinomorphic to moderately zygomorphic, tubular to rotate, the corolla of 5 petals, pink to purplish pink, maroon at base, drying lavendar, obovate, distinct from each other but adnate at base to staminal column, convolute in bud. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column; anthers in upper 1/2; filaments terminating the staminal column or borne below a 5-dentate apex; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, carpels 5, the carpels borne in a single whorl or rarely seemingly superposed whorls, placentation axile; ovules 1 per carpel, ascending; style branches 10, exceeding the staminal column; stigmas capitate.

Fruit: Schizocarp; mericarps trigonous; usually strongly glochidiate apically and dorsally; indehiscent. Seeds brown; reniform; glabrous or puberulent; with or without endosperm.

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