Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs or trees.

Stems: Smooth, grayish bark and prominent petiole scars on young branches, glabrate to stellate puberulent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades broadly ovate to subreniform in outline, sometimes 3–angled, 5–angled, or 7–angled to shallowly lobed. Surfaces glabrous or pubescent. Margins entire or shallowly to deeply crenate or dentate, base cordate. Petioles usually ⅓ or more the length of blades. Stipules obscure, subulate to triangular, caducous.

Flowers: Flowers borne near the ends of branches, 1(2) in the leaf axils, pedicels not articulate; involucral bracts 4–9, filiform to triangular or spatulate, connate basally into a narrow disk or ca. ⅓ their length. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx tubular to saccate, 5-lobed but often opening by 2–3 clefts, sepals connate, the lobes valvate in bud, persistent in fruit or circumscissilly dehiscent toward base before capsule maturity. Corolla usually zygomorphic, tubular to rotate or reflexed, the corolla of 5 petals, obovate, green, yellowish green, or magenta, curved and narrowly convolute with the 2 lower petals shorter and usually spreading or reflexed apically, densely stellate pubescent on lower surface and often on upper surface near apex, usually conspicuously veined. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column, exserted or exposed apically by the spreading lower petals; antheriferous in upper ⅓–½ below the 5–dentate apex; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, placentation axile, 5-celled; ovules (2)3 per cell; style exceeding the staminal column, branches 5, erect; stigmas terminal, capitate or discoid.

Fruit: Fruit a woody or chartaceous; ovoid to oblong–ovoid; densely pubescent; 5–valved; loculicidally dehiscent capsules; mesocarp reticulate–veined; endocarp separating from it as 5 or 10 chartaceous segments. Seeds reniform; densely matted or loose; grayish to yellowish silky tomentose; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: