Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Herbs or shrubs 1-3 m tall, yellowish to brownish stellate pubescent.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades lanceolate to ovate, 3-12 cm long. Apex acute. Base subcordate to truncate. Surfaces discolorous. Margins serrate to crenate. Petioles shorter than blades. Stipules present.

Flowers: Flowers in open, leafy, diffuse panicles, peduncles and pedicels capillary; involucel absent. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx rotate, 5-7 mm in diameter. Corolla actinomorphic to moderately zygomorphic, purplish red, sometimes orangish red apically, reflexed, often subequal to calyx; corolla of 5 petals, 3-5 mm long, obovate, distinct from each other but adnate at base to staminal column, convolute in bud; staminal column purplish, 2.5-3 mm long, pubescent. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column; filaments terminal on staminal column; anthers 10 or more on spreading filaments. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, (1-)3-celled to many-celled, carpels 5-10, borne in a single whorl or rarely seemingly superposed whorls, placentation axile; ovules 1 per carpel, pendulous; style exceeding the staminal column, branches as many as carpels; stigmas capitate.

Fruit: Schizocarp; mericarps 5; straw-colored; ovoid-trigonous; indehiscent; 2-3 mm long; acute or 2- beaked apically; tuberculate dorsally; striate-reticulate laterally stellate pubescent. Seeds brown; ca. 1.5 mm long; ovoid-trigonous; glabrous or sparsely pubescent; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy: 2n = 32

Habitat: Naturalized and common in fields and disturbed areas.

Elevation Range: