Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form:

Stems: Stems twining over beach plants or up brackish lagoon margins, herbaceous to woody toward base, up to 5 m or more long, glabrous.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple, rarely compound. Alternate. Blades broadly ovate to reniform-ovate, 8-16 cm long. Apex acute to broadly acuminate. Base cordate. Surfaces glabrous; blades coriaceous or fleshy. Margins entire or rarely few-toothed. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers solitary or occasionally 2-3(4) in cymes, pedicels 10-30 mm long; bracts scale-like to foliose. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic, 5-merous. Calyx of 5 sepals, distinct, imbricate, coriaceous with membranous margins, ovate to ovate-elliptic, 1.5-2.5 cm long, equal or unequal, glabrous, apex obtuse; often somewhat enlarging in fruit but not markedly accrescent, persistent, occasionally accrescent. Corolla of 5 fused petals; petals white, salverform, the tube 6-8(-10) cm long, 0.5-0.8 cm in diameter, the limb campanulate to rotate. Stamens 5, distinct; included or rarely exserted; filaments inserted on corolla tube base alternate with corolla lobes; anthers dithecal, usually linear or oblong, extrorse. Ovary superior, 2–4-carpellate, usually with as many cells, placentation basal or basal-axile; ovules 2(4, 6) per cell, or ovary 1-celled and ovules 4, these erect, anatropous; style 1, filiform, simple or bifid, or sometimes with 2 distinct style; stigma globose or 2–3-lobed, the lobes globose.

Fruit: Capsules tan to brown; ovoid to subglobose; 2-2.5 cm in diameter; tardily dehiscent by 4 valves or rarely 6 valves; or splitting irregularly. Seeds 1-4; dark brown; ovoid; pubescent with short stiff hairs; endosperm absent or scanty; cartilaginous; cotyledons usually foliaceous.

Ploidy: 2n = 30

Habitat: naturalized in wet sites; coastal areas; trailing over rocks or on sand.

Elevation Range: