Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Geophytic perennial herbs with a cormous rootstock.

Stems: Flowering stems terete (cylindrical).

Roots: Fibrous root system.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Usually distichous, usually isobilateral and unifacial. Blades lanceolate, plane and isobilateral. Margins often thickened and hyaline. Veins parallel. Sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in simple or branched spikes, bracts short to long, herbaceous, often becoming dry, or completely dry and brown. Flowers bisexual (perfect), sessile, actinomorphic or zygomorphic. Tepals shades of pink or red to orange, rarely white, connate into a dimorphic tube, slender below and abruptly expanded above, spreading distally, subequal. Stamens 3, symmetrically disposed around style or unilateral and either arched above upper tepal or decumbent over lower tepal. Ovary inferior, globose; style slender, divided apically into 3 branches, each deeply divided ½ its length.

Fruit: Capsules globose to oblong. Seeds several per cell; angular or winged.

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