Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herb to 80 cm tall.

Stems: Stems slender, angular, sometimes woody at base, (5–)15–40 cm long, unbranched to many-branched, glabrous or pubescent at base.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Basal leaves rosulate and early deciduous. Lower cauline leaves spatulate to obovate below, linear to lanceolate above, 1–4 cm long, 0.2–0.8 cm wide. Surfaces glabrous, juvenile leaves sometimes pubescent. Margins entire to serrate–dentate. Sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal or axillary panicles, pedicellate. Flowers bisexual (perfect); Hypanthium 5–nerved or 10–nerved. Calyx of 5 connate sepals, glabrous; tube adnate to ovary. Corolla actinomorphic or, if zygomorphic, then often laterally fenestrate or dorsally cleft, connate, 5 petals, white to pale blue, 4–15(–25) mm in diameter, campanulate. Stamens 5, alternate with corolla lobes, dark blue to purple; 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: Capsules obconical; 6–10 mm long; apically loculicidal. Seeds numerous; small; lenticular or trigonous; smooth or minutely reticulate; with a straight; short to spatulate dicotyledonous embryo embedded in oily endosperm.

Ploidy: 2n = 18; 36; 64

Habitat: Sparingly naturalized in dry; disturbed areas; locally common during wetter months.

Elevation Range: 0–2,850 m.