Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Erect, prostrate, or decumbent perennial herbs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Surfaces pubescent or rarely glabrous. Margins entire, toothed, crenate, undulate, or rarely lobed, usually cartilaginous. Sessile or short–petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal or axillary panicles, pedicellate. Flowers bisexual (perfect); Hypanthium 5–nerved or 10–nerved. Calyx of 5 connate sepals, tube adnate to ovary. Corolla actinomorphic or, if zygomorphic, then often laterally fenestrate or dorsally cleft, connate, 5 petals, blue to purple or white, campanulate. Stamens 5, alternate with corolla lobes; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, coherent but separating after anthesis or connate and forming a tube into which pollen is shed; filaments distinct, attached to the epigynous nectary disk or to base of corolla, rarely adnate to corolla tube. Ovary inferior to rarely superior, 2–5-celled; ovule placentation axile; stigmas wet or dry, 2–5-lobed, appressed and nonreceptive as the style grows through the anther tube, pushing out the pollen, after which the stigmas spread apart and become receptive; style with as many lobes as cells.

Fruit: Fruit a hemispherical to cylindrical; apically loculicidal capsules. Seeds numerous; small; lenticular or trigonous; smooth or minutely reticulate; with a straight; short to spatulate dicotyledonous embryo embedded in oily endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: