Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Suffrutescent, decumbent, sparsely branching plants.

Stems: Woody stems up to 30 cm. long covered by a corky, longitudinally grooved epidermis and banded by corky rings and the connate bases of the petioles, the stems usually hidden by the congested persistent dead leaves. the branching pattern subscorpioid and the branches somewhat parallel, inflorescences terminating each branch and a new branch growing from the axillary bud just below the inflorescence (or sometimes both buds developing into branches), these branches in turn terminating in inflorescences, etc. The stems may reach a diameter of 1–2 cm. at the base, and are light brown to whitish in color.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Blades broadly ovate to broadly elliptic, 5.5–15 cm long, (2–)3.5–7.5 cm wide. Surfaces minutely white–scabrous, blades fleshy, convex, dark shining green above and rather glaucous, but with darker veins, below. Margins entire. Lateral veins strongly ascending, scarcely anastomosing, higher order venation indistinct. Sessile or subsessile. Stipules very broad, ca. 3-3.5 mm long, apex with a mucro ca. 1.5 mm long.

Flowers: Flowers on scapes ca.7– 15 cm long in corymbose cymes, pedicels 5–18 mm long, cymes subtended by ovate–cordate bracts up to 5 cm long; hypanthium obscurely quadrangular, 0.5–0.8 mm long. Flowers insect-pollinated, bisexual (perfect). Calyx 4-5-lobed, lobes foliaceous, broadly ovate, ca. 3–4 mm long and wide, becoming chartaceous and greatly enlarging to 8–11 mm long and nearly as wide in fruit. Corolla green, fleshy, urceolate, the tube 5–8 mm long, about as long as wide, the limb sub–quadrangular in bud, apex depressed, 4-5-lobed, the lobes ca. 4 mm long, inflexed in bud. Stamens as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted near constricted neck of corolla, scarcely exserted; anthers sessile or on short filaments, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior or partly so, 2(-4)-locular; ovules few to numerous on fleshy placentas near middle of septum; style as many as carpels, cylindrical to filiform, terminal, slender, pilose toward base, apex 4-lobed; stigma bilobed or subcapitate, included or exserted.

Fruit: Fruits dry; flattened–lentiform to depressed subglobose; the calyx–lobes persisting–accrescent to about twice the size they are in flower; lobes fenestrate; 5–7+nerved; spreading; attached at the equator of the fruit; fruit dehiscing first loculicidally across the disc; the pyrenes later separating by a septicidal slit. Seeds dark brown to nearly black; irregularly angled; papillose to granulate; with well-developed oily endosperm; or endosperm occasionally scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Known only from rocky crevices of basalt sea cliffs.

Elevation Range: 3–45 m.