Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Diffuse, sometimes scandent herbs or subshrubs.

Stems: Slender branches up to 1.5 m long, pubescent with stellate, glandular, and usually simple, spreading hairs.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades cordate-ovate, up to 7(-10) cm long. Apex acute to acuminate. Margins crenate to serrate. Lower leaves petiolate, the upper ones subsessile and amplixicaul. Stipules present.

Flowers: Flowers solitary in the leaf axils, pedicels filiform, 1-4 cm long, geniculate; involucel absent, the bracts distinct or basally connate. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx composed of connate sepals, 5-lobed, sometimes irregularly cleft or truncate, 4-7 mm long, reflexed in fruit, valvate in bud. Corolla actinomorphic to moderately zygomorphic, tubular to rotate or reflexed, corolla of 5 petals, white, 0.6-0.9(-1.1) cm long, distinct from each other but adnate at base to staminal column, convolute in bud. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column, staminal column shorter than petals, up to 3 mm long, terminated by filaments; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, carpels 8-14, the carpels borne in a single whorl or rarely seemingly superposed whorls, placentation axile; ovules 1-3 per carpel; style exceeding the staminal column, branches as many as carpels; stigmas terminal, capitate.

Fruit: Fruit a pendulous; inflated; oblate schizocarp; whitish; fluted; papery; 1.5-2 cm in diameter; silvery hirsute with simple hairs; mericarps 10-12(-14); reniform; without awns; scarious; apically and dorsally dehiscent. Seeds 1-3 per mericarp; 1.5-1.8 mm long; puberulent; brown or black; ovoid-reniform; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy: 2n = 14

Habitat: Naturalized on an an arid ridge.

Elevation Range: Low elevations.