Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs or shrubs, pubescence various, often hispid, the hairs stellate and simple.

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Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades ovate to transverse–elliptic in outline, unlobed or palmately angled, lobed, or parted. Apex acute to obtuse. Base truncate to subcordate. Margins serrate. Petioles conspicuous. Stipules filiform, sometimes divided into multiple segments.

Flowers: Flowers in axillary and terminal headlike cymes, subtended and at least partly enclosed by foliaceous, sometimes folded, usually cordate-ovate, scarious, veiny, sessile bracts; involucral bracts absent or 9-12. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx composed of connate sepals, (3-)5-toothed or (3-)5-lobed, sometimes irregularly cleft or truncate, the lobes valvate in bud, often with conspicuously colored veins. Corolla actinomorphic to moderately zygomorphic, tubular to rotate or reflexed, corolla of 5 petals, obovate, white, yellow, reddish, or lavender, distinct from each other but adnate at base to staminal column, 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: Schizocarps; mericarps trigonous-obovoid; essentially indehiscent; reticulate-veined; glabrous or pubescent. Seeds trigonous; glabrous; with or without endosperm.

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