Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herbs or subshrubs, pale yellowish green throughout (at least in cultivation).

Stems: Stems often swollen at the nodes,terete, 4–angled or –ridged, 4–7.6 dm long, ascending to sprawling when longer, conspicuously quadrangular, the angles weakly winged, glabrous throughout.

Roots: Fibrous root system.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Blades lanceolate to oblong–elliptic, 4.5–10.5 cm long, 1.4–2.6 cm wide. Apex acute to attenuate. Base leaf bases often connate around the stem, base acute to obtuse. Blades coriaceous, with only the midvein evident. Margins slightly thickened and weakly revolute. Midvein ± slightly excentric. Petioles 0.4–0.8 cm long, the base often flared at juncture with stem and the leaf pair slightly connate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescence terminal, with 10–70 flowers, 40–50 cm long, weakly diffuse, the lateral branches 11–18 cm long, ascending, each with 25–35 flowers; bracts yellowish green, foliaceous, and nearly as large as the leaves in the lower portions of the central axis and the lateral branches, those in the upper part of the inflorescence and subtending the flower narrowly lanceolate to subulate, 3–11 mm long; pedicels 3–8 mm long at anthesis, elongating slightly in fruit, but none over 9 mm long, conspicuously asymmetrically flattened. Flowers bisexual (perfect), facultatively autogamous. Sepals 3.9–4.2 mm long, lanceolate, dull yellowish green, greener toward the center, sometimes with purple toward the apex, thick and opaque, ascending and concave to shallowly navicular toward the apex, oriented at 90° to 135°angle to the pedicel, abaxial side smooth and rounded, glabrous, margins weakly scarious, sparsely ciliate, apex attenuate. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens 10; filaments weakly dimorphic, the antisepalous whorl 3.2–3.5 mm long, the alternate whorl 2.8–3.0 mm long; anthers 0.3–0.4 mm long, subequal, yellow, dehiscing after flower opens. Ovary superior, 1-celled; ovule placentation free-central; styles (3–) 4–5; stigmas receptive when flower opens.

Fruit: Capsules 3.7–4.2 mm long; ovoid. Seeds ca. 16–22 per capsule; 0.7–0.9 mm long; suborbicular; asymmetrical; compressed brown; remaining coherent as a unit and persistent on the placenta after dehiscence of capsule; seeds eventually dispersing (or perhaps germinating in situ in the wild); the surface rugose; perisperm starchy; hard or rarely soft; true endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Wet montane forests.

Elevation Range: ca. 1930 m.