Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Erect or spreading herbs or short-lived, soft–wooded shrubs, glabrous or sparsely pubescent with simple hairs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple, often geminate (occuring in pairs). Alternate. Blades ovate or elliptic. Margins usually entire. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers 1 to few in the leaf axils, pedicellate, often recurved at anthesis and erect in fruit. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic. Calyx shortly tubular, truncate, the lobes short or reduced to marginal teeth or absent. Corolla white or pale bluish, 5-lobed, deeply divided to broadly stellate. Stamens 5, equal; filaments inserted at base of corolla tube; anthers yellow or purplish, opening by slits. Ovary superior, 2-celled, placentation axile; ovules numerous; style erect; stigma capitate.

Fruit: Fruit a dryish berry; usually bright red when ripe; occasionally purple; yellow; or white; globose to conical. Seeds few to numerous; yellow or pale buff; flattened; 3–5 mm in diameter; embryo curved; endosperm present.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: