Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Biennial or perennial herbs, coarsely grayish white strigose.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Cauline Alternate. Basal leaves long–petiolate. Margins usually entire. Short–petiolate to subsessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in +/- scorpioid, paniculate or racemose cymes. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx 5-lobed, spreading or recurved in fruit. Corolla white, blue, or pink, funnelform or salverform, 5-lobed, the tube short, with scales in the throat. Stamens as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted on the tube, sometimes unequal, often with basal appendages; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, not exserted. Ovary superior, 2(4–5)-carpellate, the carpels connate to various degrees, 2-celled, often becoming 4-celled by means of false septa, entire to 4-lobed; ovules usually 4, 2 per carpel, eventually 1 per cell, sometimes fewer by abortion, anatropous, erect, ascending, or nearly horizontal, rarely pendulous; style 1(2), sometimes 2-lobed, gynobasic, arising from between the essentially distinct ovary lobes, sometimes terminal, often heterostylous; stigma usually simple, capitate or discoid, sometimes 2-lobed or 4-lobed.

Fruit: Fruit consisting of 4 nutlets; widely spreading at maturity; apically attached to the gynobase; flat on the back; covered with barbed or hooked prickles. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: