Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs 0.3–1 m tall, with white, yellow, or tan latex.

Stems: Stems sparingly branched, unarmed, muricate, or aculeate.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades cordiform, blades 8.5–10.5 cm long, 7–8 cm wide. Apex acute. Base cordate. Surfaces glabrous. Margins callose–crenulate. Petioles 12–15 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences 30–40–flowered, in axillary racemes, the rachis sometimes not expanded, the raceme thus appearing subumbellate, glabrous, peduncles 25–30 mm long, pedicels 7–10 mm long; hypanthium obconical, 7–8 mm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx 5-lobed, lobes dentiform, 0.5–1 mm long, distinct or rarely connate, tube adnate to ovary. Corolla zygomorphic, white with purple longitudinal stripes, 20–22 mm long, 3–3.5 mm wide, glabrous or pubescent, rarely muricate, gently curved, dorsally cleft to about the middle, the lobes connate, spreading. Stamens 5, alternate with corolla lobes, connate; staminal column glabrous; anthers glabrous, all 5 with apical tufts of white hairs, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, coherent but separating after anthesis or connate and forming a tube into which pollen is shed; filaments distinct or connate above, attached to the epigynous nectary disk or to base of corolla, rarely adnate to corolla tube. Ovary inferior, 2-celled; ovule placentation axile; stigma 2-lobed, wet or dry, appressed and nonreceptive as the style grows through the anther tube, pushing out the pollen, after which the stigmas spread apart and become receptive.

Fruit: Berries dark purple; globose; ca. 1 cm long. Seeds numerous; small; brown to black; smooth; shiny; 0.2–0.5(–2) mm long; with a straight; short to spatulate dicotyledonous embryo embedded in oily endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Only known specimen collected on sheer rock cliff.

Elevation Range: ca. 330 m.