Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Stiffly branched, erect herbs or subshrubs 0.5–2.5 m tall.

Stems: Stems glabrate or stellate pubescent, often hispid with simple hairs.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades ovate to transverse–elliptic in outline, up to 10(–15) cm long, unlobed or shallowly 3–5–lobed. Base truncate. Margins serrate. Petioles usually ½ or more the length of blades. Stipules up to 2 cm long, sometimes bifurcate or divided into as many as 4 segments.

Flowers: Flowers in sessile or short-pedunculate heads, subtended and at least partly enclosed by whitish, green-veined, ovate to triangular, cordate, folded bracts 1-2.5 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx white with reddish veins, tubular–campanulate, 0.5–0.8 cm long, composed of connate sepals, (3-)5-toothed or (3-)5-lobed, sometimes irregularly cleft or truncate, the lobes valvate in bud. Corolla actinomorphic to moderately zygomorphic, tubular to rotate or reflexed, corolla of 5 petals, pale to dark yellow, ovate, 1–2 cm long, distinct from each other but adnate at base to staminal column, nearly equalling the yellow staminal column, styles, and stigmas, convolute in bud. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column, staminal column at least partly included, apex irregularly dentate, closely and openly antheriferous; filaments terminating the staminal column or borne below a 5-dentate apex; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, carpels 5; ovules 1 per carpel, placentation axile; style branches 10, sometimes appearing fewer by connation, style exceeding the staminal column; stigmas capitate.

Fruit: Schizocarp; mericarps 5; muticous; papery; 3–3.5 mm long; reddish–veined; trigonous-obovoid; essentially indehiscent; reticulate-veined; glabrous or puberulent. Seeds black; ca. 2.5 mm long; glabrous; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy: 2n = 56

Habitat: Naturalized in disturbed places.

Elevation Range: Low elevations.