Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Erect, spreading shrub to 3.5 m tall.

Stems: Much branched, stems squarish and downy-hairy, +/- hollow.

Roots: Suckering freely.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite, each pair at right angles to next. Blades broadly ovate, to 2.5 x 2.5 cm. Apex rounded to tapering. Base cordate. Surfaces densely pubescent, undersides whitish downy. Margins entire or coarsely toothed. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescence a terminal, erect panicle, with bright scarlet flowers (rarely white), each flower +/- bracgteolate. Flowers odorless. Calyx bell-shaped, 5-toothed, enlarging, platterlike and red in fruit. Corolla nearly actinomorphic or slightly irregular, salver-shaped, 0.8-1.25" long, limb 5-lobed, subequal, spreading, 1.25-2.5" diam., slightly to greatly exceeding the calyx; nectary disk often present at base of ovary, annular or developed on anterior side only. Stamens 4(5), in 2 pairs, inserted on corolla tube and usually long–exserted, aligned with the sinuses; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, occasionally 1 theca reduced or absent or the 2 thecae confluent, occasionally the connective elongate and thus separating the thecae. Ovary superior, rarely on a gynophore, 4-celled; ovules 1 per cell, attached laterally; style arising between lobes, placentation basal-axile; ovules 1 per ovary lobe, anatropous to hemitropous of apotropous; style 1, usually cleft; stigmas 2, sometimes 1 reduced and vestigial.

Fruit: Fruit 2-4 lobed; flattened; blue-black when ripe; separating into 4 sections. Seeds oblong; with endosperm absent or scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: