Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Lianas.

Stems: Stems herbaceous toward tips, woody at base, often more than 10 m long, glabrous.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades usually palmately 7–lobed, sometimes nearly to base, the lobes lanceolate to elliptic. Apex acuminate. Base acute, cordate to truncate, petiolate, subsessile, or sessile. Surfaces glabrous, chartaceous. Margins entire. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in compound cymes or occasionally solitary, peduncles usually 10–20 cm long, pedicels 2–3 cm long, bracts scale-like. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic, 5-merous. Calyx of 5 sepals, distinct, imbricate, coriaceous, unequal, outer ones oblong, 25-30 mm long, apex obtuse, mucronulate, inner ones smaller, 12-20 mm long, apex acute, glabrous or pubescent; persistent, occasionally accrescent. Corolla of 5 fused petals; petals yellow, nearly funnelform, 5–6 cm long, glabrous. Stamens 5, distinct; filaments equal or subequal, inserted on corolla tube base alternate with corolla lobes, usually glabrous at base; anthers spirally twisted; anthers dithecal, usually linear or oblong, extrorse, with complete dehiscence. Ovary superior, 2–3-carpellate, usually glabrous, placentation basal or basal-axile; ovules 4–6; style 1, filiform, simple or bifid; stigma simple, globose or 2-lobed, the lobes globose, included.

Fruit: Capsules brown; irregularly dehiscent; subglobose; 30–35 mm in diameter; subtended by the accrescent sepals; pericarp thin and fragile. Seeds 1–4; black to dark brown; 1–1.5 cm long; densely short–tomentose; endosperm absent or scanty; cartilaginous; cotyledons usually foliaceous.

Ploidy: 2n = 30

Habitat: Commonly cultivated and sparingly naturalized in disturbed sites.

Elevation Range: 25–560 m.