Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial vines from fibrous roots or a taproot.

Stems: Stems scandent, occasionally with adventitious roots at the nodes, sometimes becoming woody at base.

Roots: Fibrous roots or a taproot.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, occasionally the lowermost opposite. Blades hastate to broadly sagittate. Margins entire, rarely crenate. Petioles twining. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers solitary in the leaf axils. peduncles terete (cylindrical) or winged toward apex, not recurved in fruit. Calyx urceolate, 5-lobed, cleft to the base, the lobes lanceolate, occasionally enlarging in fruit and becoming cartilaginous or indurate. Corolla pink, red, blue to violet, whitish toward base, bilabiate, the throat open or closed by the raised palate, the lobes subequal, apex rounded to broadly acute, occasionally emarginate, the upper 2 lobes overlapping lower ones in bud, recurved, the lower 3 recurved or projecting forward. Stamens 4, in 2 pairs, included in corolla, not elongating at anthesis, staminode vestigial; filaments basally villous, enlarged toward apex. Ovary superior, 2-carpellate, with as many cells; ovule placentation axile; stigma conical.

Fruit: Capsules irregularly ovoid; triangular–ovoid; or globose; symmetrical to asymmetrical; sometimes laterally compressed; cartilaginous or woody; the 2 cells subequal or unequal; dehiscing irregularly or transversely. Seeds dark brown; rectangular; not winged; and tuberculate–cristate; or ovoid; circumwinged; and minutely tuberculate.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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