Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herbs up to 50 cm tall, vegetative growth usually annual, erect, with intraxylary phloem; forming colonies from underground root system.

Stems: Branched above, usually armed with straight, fine, reddish prickles 2–5 mm long, usually on stems, occasionally on petioles, leaves, and calyx, all parts densely and closely tomentose with stellate hairs, general aspect silvery green, rarely reddish brown.

Roots: Fibrous root system.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Lower blades oblong–lanceolate, upper leaves smaller oblong, entire, lower leaves up to 10 cm long and 4 cm wide. Apex or lower leaves acute or obtuse. Base lower leave base rounded or cuneate. Surfaces densely stellate–tomentose, often bicolor with upper surface green and lower surface silvery having a greater density of hairs. Margins of lower leaves sinuate–undulate. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers few in racemose cymes, peduncle up to 1 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic; pedicels ca. 1 cm long at anthesis, elongating to 2–3 cm long in fruit. Calyx tube up to 5 mm long, 5–ribbed by the principal veins, the lobes subulate. Corolla blue, rotate–stellate, 2–3 cm in diameter, the lobes divided ca. 1⁄2 their length. Stamens (4)5, inserted near base of corolla tube; filaments 3–4 mm long; anthers yellow, slender, tapered upward, conspicuous, erect, not coherent, 5–8 mm long, opening by apical pores.

Fruit: Berries at first marbled green; later yellow to finally orangish brown; mucilaginous; globose; 0.8–1.4 cm in diameter; calyx covering base of fruit. Seeds pale brown; discoid; flattened; ca. 3 mm long; smooth; embryo curved; submarginal; endosperm present.

Ploidy: 2n = 24; 72

Habitat: Disturbed agricultural sites.

Elevation Range: