Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Pale green to gray, erect to decumbent perennial herbs 1–5 dm tall, moderately to densely appressed pubescent.

Stems: Stems 1 to several from base, usually branched above.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Usually alternate. Blades linear–lanceolate, narrowly oblanceolate to elliptic, flat, sometimes revolute, 1–4 cm long, 0.2–1 cm wide. Apex acute or short-acuminate. Base attenuate. Surfaces strigose. Margins usually entire. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in clusters of 1–4 elongate, open, bracteate, scorpioid cymes 2.5–10 cm long. Peduncles 0.5–3 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic or occasionally slightly irregular. Calyx deeply divided, the lobes unequal, linear to lanceolate, at anthesis 1–1.2 mm long, at maturity nearly doubling in size and becoming progressively more unequal; sepals distinct or connate at base, sometimes to above the middle. Corolla white, 1.5–3 mm long, the tube sparsely strigose externally; (4)5(6)-lobed, the tube often with scales at the summit opposite the lobes, formed by invagination of the corolla tube, the lobes imbricate or convolute, rarely valvate. Stamens as many as corolla lobes, inserted on the corolla tube, not exserted. Ovary superior, 4-celled, entire, rounded, or 2–4-lobed; ovules usually 4, 2 per carpel, eventually 1 per cell, sometimes fewer by abortion, anatropous, erect, ascending, or nearly horizontal, rarely pendulous; style simple, terminal, seated in the pericarp; stigma with a fertile discoid base and a sterile, apical, often forked appendage.

Fruit: Fruit dry; lobed or unlobed; breaking up into nutlets; nutlets 4; 1–seeded; ovoid; 1–2 mm long; densely strigose. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy: 2n = 14

Habitat: Naturalized in low elevation; dry; often coastal sites.

Elevation Range: