Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Low, slender annual or perennial herbs, often covered with firm unicellular hairs with a basal cystolith.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Margins entire. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in open, bractless, scorpioid cymes that uncoil progressively as the flowers open, rarely with a few bracts toward base. Flowers small, subsessile, or pedicellate. Calyx 5-lobed, sepals distinct or connate at base, sometimes to above the middle, the lobes narrow, erect or spreading in fruit. Corolla yellow, becoming blue, salverform, 5-lobed, with prominent scales in the throat; the lobes imbricate or convolute, rarely valvate. Stamens 5, as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, included in corolla tube, sometimes unequal, often with basal appendages; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2(4–5)-carpellate, the carpels connate to various degrees, 2-celled, often becoming 4-celled by means of false septa, entire to 4-lobed; ovules usually 4, 2 per carpel, eventually 1 per cell, sometimes fewer by abortion, anatropous, erect, ascending, or nearly horizontal, rarely pendulous; style 1(2), sometimes 2-lobed, gynobasic, arising from between the essentially distinct ovary lobes, sometimes terminal, often heterostylous; stigma usually simple, capitate, sometimes 2-lobed or 4-lobed.

Fruit: Fruit consisting of 4 nutlets; erect; ovoid; somewhat compressed; smooth and shiny; often with a distinct rim. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: