Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual herbs from thin taproots.

Stems: Flowering stems decumbent to ascending, 1.5–5 dm long, often branched, puberulent and sometimes also glandular puberulent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite and basal. Blades suborbicular to reniform, usually 0.5–2 cm long, 1–3 cm wide. Surfaces puberulent and sometimes also glandular puberulent especially on lower surface. Margins deeply palmately 3–5-lobed, the lobes oblong–cuneate, these again divided. Petioles 1–4 cm long. Stipules lanceolate, 1–3 mm long, ciliate with long, simple hairs.

Flowers: Flowers usually in pairs in the leaf axils; peduncles and pedicels slender; Peduncles 1–2 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic; pedicels 0.5–1 cm long, puberulent and glandular puberulent, subtended by narrow bracts. Calyx of 5 sepals, elliptic to oblong, 3–4 mm long, puberulent and also glandular puberulent, especially when younger, ciliate with stiff, simple hairs, apex acute or bluntly mucronate, distinct or sometimes connate at base, rarely forming a tube. Petals pale purple to pink, narrowly obovate, 2–4 mm long. Stamens (5)10; filaments ± connate at base, those alternate with the petals longer than others and with basal glands; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior or nearly so, 5-celled, carpels connate around a central column to form a compound ovary with as many cells, fertile portion a lobed ring at base of stylar column, placentation axile; ovules 2 per cell, anatropous to campylotropous, usually pendulous; styles 3–5, slender and beak-like, stylar column elongating to 5–9 mm long in fruit, not with a narrower apical portion; stigmas slender and dry, rarely capitate.

Fruit: Septicidal and elastically dehiscent capsules separating into as many segments as carpels; a portion of the style splitting off from remainder of stylar column and forming an awn that recurves upward from the persistent central column; usually remaining attached to apex; sometimes the awn also becomes spirally coiled; awn usually hygroscopic; carpel bodies ca. 2 mm long; finely and densely puberulent; the surface smooth. Seeds 1–2 per segment; brown; ca. 1 mm long; smooth; endosperm usually scanty or absent; rarely copious and oily.

Ploidy: 2n = 26; 34

Habitat:

Elevation Range: ca. 2,000 m.