Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs or subshrubs.

Stems: Stems and leaves often succulent or semisucculent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Margins crenate, serrate, or dentate. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers six to numerous in lax or dense cymes or verticillasters, these arranged in axillary or terminal, spike-like, racemose, or paniculate inflorescences, each flower +/- bracteolate. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or sometimes unisexual (and then plants gynodioecious or rarely dioecious), usually small. Calyx bilabiate to nearly actinomorphic, cylindrical to campanulate, straight or curved downward, often enlarging in fruit, 5-toothed, splitting longitudinally, usually persistent or sometimes only ventral 1/2 persistent. Corolla strongly zygomorphic, bilabiate, the tube exserted beyond calyx, curved or straight, sometimes with a spur or protuberance on upper side, upper lip short, 3–4-lobed, recurved, lower lip boat–shaped, entire or notched; nectary disk often present at base of ovary, annular or developed on anterior side only. Stamens 4, distinct or connate toward base into a sheath around the style or inserted on corolla tube; anther sacs confluent. Ovary superior, 2-carpellate, placentation basal-axile; ovules 1 per ovary lobe, anatropous to hemitropous or apotropous; style 1, shortly 2 lobed; stigmas 2.

Fruit: Nutlets 4; globose or occasionally cylindrical or ovoid; smooth; granulate; or punctate. Seeds with endosperm absent or scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: