Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Parasitic, annual or perennial, twining vines, attaching to the host by haustoria, appearing leafless and rootless, chlorophyll absent or scanty.

Stems: Stems pale yellow, slender, usually filiform juvenile plants with a small root system that rapidly degenerates, at maturity plants not connected to the ground, pubescent with simple hairs.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves very reduced, scale-like. Alternate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in compact, short–pedicellate, globose clusters, often glandular pubescent. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic, 5-merous. Calyx of (3)4–5 sepals; sepals distinct or connate at base, sometimes connate nearly to apex, lobes elliptic to suborbicular, nearly concealing the corolla tube, apex rounded, overlapping at base when young. Corolla of 5 fused petals, urceolate, campanulate, or cylindrical, (3)4–5-merous, the tube usually bearing variously fringed or cleft scales below stamens; corolla lobes white or pink, imbricate, triangular, spreading, margins somewhat inflexed at apex, apex acute, the tube campanulate, nearly as long as lobes. Staminal filaments shorter than lobes, scales below Stamens conspicuous, ovate, the margins fringed; anthers shorter than filaments. Ovary superior, 2(3)-carpellate, with as many cells, the partition sometimes incomplete, placentation basal-axile; ovules 2 per cell, anatropous; styles slender, terminal, simple or deeply lobed, nearly as long as ovary; stigmas dry, discoid, capitate to cylindrical.

Fruit: Circumscissile or irregularly dehiscent capsules; sometimes indehiscent and then usually somewhat fleshy; capsules depressed–globose; 2.5–3 mm in diameter; the withered corolla persisting at base. Seeds 1–4; the surface smooth or roughened; nearly without cotyledons; endosperm starchy; ca. 1 mm long.

Ploidy: 2n = 56

Habitat: Sparingly naturalized on O‘ahu and Hawai‘i. The host of the O‘ahu collection was <i>Jatropha integerrima</i>; but the species appears to favor legumes;.

Elevation Range: