Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Climbing shrub.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite, each pair at right angles to next. Blades broadly ovate to elliptic. Upper surfaces glabrous. Margins entire. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in usually open, determinate cymes, occasionally in dense or subcapitate cymes or heads, each flower +/- bracteolate. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx bell-shaped, clasping, 0.125" long or less. Corolla nearly actinomorphic or slightly irregular, orange-red, 0.8-1" long, salverform or funnelform, slightly to greatly exceeding the calyx, 5-lobed, the lobes subequal; 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 drupaceous; globose or obovoid; weakly 4-lobed; separating at maturity into 4 pyrenes or sometimes cohering in pairs; subtended or enclosed by the persistent calyx; exocarp ± fleshy; endocarp bony or crustaceous. Seeds oblong; with endosperm absent or scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: