Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herbs.

Stems: Stems prostrate to ascending or erect, weak and often becoming tangled, sometimes rooting at the lower nodes.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite, becoming alternate above. Blades linear–lanceolate, 1–2.8 cm long, 0.2–0.6(–0.8) cm wide. Margins entire, toothed, or deeply dissected, prominent, whitish and thickened, serrate. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in indeterminate spikes, lateral inflorescences sometimes present in the upper leaf axils, each one subtended by a bract and bracteoles. Flowers usually small, bisexual (perfect) or unisexual (and then plants monoecious or dioecious), actinomorphic. Calyx of (3)4 sepals. Petals as many as sepals, hooded, clawed, and keeled; deciduous with the stamens, red to yellow. Stamens 8, all fertile; anthers tetrathecal, opening by slits. Ovary inferior, (3)4-celled; ovules 1(2) per cell, but only 1 maturing, anatropous, pendulous from apex; styles as many as sepals, feathery.

Fruit: Fruit small; nutlike; ovoid; 8–ribbed; densely papillose on and between the ribs; with persistent; erect sepals; the septa ± absent. Seeds 1 per fruit; filling entire fruit; endosperm copious; fleshy and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Sparingly naturalized in wet forest.

Elevation Range: