Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Decumbent perennial herbs, flowering shoots ascending.

Stems: Stems up to 7 dm long, usually puberulent.

Roots: Rooting at lower nodes.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite and decussate (pairs of leaves alternating 90 degrees between nodes). Ovate to lanceolate, 2-8 cm long, 1-5 cm wide. Apex acute to short-acuminate. Base rounded to broadly cuneate. Surfaces glabrous to sparsely pilose. Margins repand–crenate or entire. Petioles up to 2 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in dense terminal spikes 3–10 cm long. each spike subtended by 1 ovate to oblong bract and 2 oblanceolate to lanceolate bracteoles, the bracts imbricate. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx 5-lobed, the lobes unequal, linear–subulate. Bracts ovate to broadly ovate, 10–25 mm long, sparsely strigose, puberulent, and long-ciliate. Corolla 5-lobed; white or bluish lavender, 1.2–1.5 cm long. Stamens 4, in pairs, inserted on the corolla alternate with the lobes, sometimes 1 or more reduced to staminodes; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2-carpellate, placentation axile; ovules few per cells.

Fruit: Capsules with two cells; usually dehiscing explosively; oblong–ellipsoid; 0.5–0.7 cm long; puberulent. Seeds brown; orbicular; compressed; ca. 1.5 mm in diameter; on small hooked stalks (modified funiculus) that ejects the seeds from the capsule; embryos usually large; endosperm absent.

Ploidy: 2n = 34

Habitat:

Elevation Range: