Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Soft–wooded shrubs up to 2 m tall, straggly with age, with intraxylary phloem.

Stems: Stems angular with raised lines, glabrous except for minute simple and glandular hairs on young shoots and corolla tips, unarmed.

Roots: Fibrous root system.

Leaves: Leaves simple, sometimes pinnatisect (divided nearly to the midrib). Alternate. Blades greatly variable in shape, lobed leaves broadly elliptic to ovate in outline, 3–11–lobed, sinuses rounded, cut to within 1 cm of midvein, lobes lanceolate or long–triangular, 1–10 cm long, 1–2 cm wide; entire leaves lanceolate–elliptic, lobed leaves to 15–30 cm long, 10–15 cm wide, entire leaves up to 10 cm long and 2 cm wide. Lobed leaves with leaf and lobe apex acute to acuminate; entire leaves apex acute to acuminate. Base entire leaves base cuneate, oblique. Simple hairs, unarmed. Margins entire. Petioles 1–1.5 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers few to 10 in scorpioid cymes in the leaf axils or stem forks, often branched near the base with a pedicellate flower in fork, peduncle usually absent, pedicels 1.5–2 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic. Calyx campanulate, 3–4 mm long, the lobes bluntly triangular. Corolla bluish violet, rotate–stellate, 3–4 cm in diameter, shallowly campanulate and often facing downward. Stamens (4)5, inserted on corolla tube, alternate with corolla lobes; filaments thick, ca. 3 mm long; anthers dithecal, oblong, ca. 4 mm long, opening by apical pores developing into short slits. Ovary superior, 2-celled, 2(3–4)-carpellate, placentation axile; ovules numerous, broadly conical, glabrous; style 1, erect, weakly sigmoid, glabrous; stigma terminal, 2-lobed.

Fruit: Berries bright orangish red to scarlet; succulent; obovoid to ellipsoid; pendent; up to 2 cm long; 1–1.5 cm in diameter. Seeds numerous; reddish brown; lenticular; ca. 1.5 mm long; finely reticulate; compressed; embryo curved; submarginal; endosperm present; stone cell masses rounded; 1–1.5 mm long; not conspicuous.

Ploidy: 2n = 46; 48; 92; 96

Habitat: Ridges and summits in wet forest.

Elevation Range: ca. 840 m.