Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Prostrate, branched shrubs.

Stems: Stems quadrangular, densely hirtellous or glabrous, older stems with prominent exfoliating corky layers, with short, congested, leafy shoots in the axils.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Blades lanceolate to ovate or cordate. 1–3(–4) cm long, 0.3–2 cm wide. Apex acute or acuminate. Base attenuate or cordate. Lower surfaces glabrous or hirtellous along midrib, Blades subcoriaceous to chartaceous. Margins entire. Lateral veins few, strongly ascending, higher order venation inconspicuously reticulate. Petioles 0–0.2 cm long, connate at base. Stipules lanceolate with a broad base, ca. 2.5–2.8 mm long, glabrous or hirtellous, more or less somewhat fimbriate.

Flowers: Flowers 1-10 in reduced, terminal, corymbose cymes, these puberulent in lower part, bracts cordate to lanceolate, 10–15 mm long; hypanthium turbinate, 1.5-2 mm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect) and pistillate; insect-pollinated. Calyx lobes foliaceous, broadly lanceolate, 4–8 mm long, 1.5–3.5 mm wide, enlarging somewhat in fruit. Corolla color unknown, fleshy, glaucous, salverform, the tube ca. 6–7 mm long, the limb not quadrangular in bud, but apex depressed, the lobes ca. 3–4 mm long at anthesis, strongly inflexed in bud; nectary disk present. Stamens as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted just below mouth of corolla tube; anthers sessile or on short filaments, apparently dehiscing prior to anthesis, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior or partly so, 2(-4)-locular; ovules few to numerous on fleshy placentas near middle of septum; styles as many as carpels, cylindrical to filiform, terminal, slender, densely long–woolly toward base, apex 2–lobed; stigma bilobed or subcapitate, included or exserted.

Fruit: Capsules subglobose; up to 3 mm long; 4–5 mm in diameter; dehiscing loculicidally across disk; then ca. ½ to base; pyrenes very tardily separating septicidally; endocarp somewhat sclerified; disk raised. Seeds nearly black; angled; pitted; with well-developed oily endosperm; or endosperm occasionally scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Mesic forest.

Elevation Range: 1200–1220 m.