Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Evergreen perennial herbs, with erect rhizomes partly sheathed by brownish, fibrous to sometimes fleshy or glutinous leaf bases.

Stems: Flowering stems more or less terete (cylindrical), usually branched.

Roots: Fibrous root system.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Usually distichous, usually isobilateral and unifacial. Blades leaves lanceolate to linear. Surfaces glabrous. Margins entire. Veins parallel. Sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences comprising 1 or more clusters enclosed in a pair of opposed spathe-like bracts. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic. Tepals shades of yellow, with contrasting dark brownish markings on the claws, distinct, broadly clawed, outer ones larger, inner ones with nectaries in lower ½, partly concealed by a geniculate fold. Stamens 3; filaments distinct, slender and weak, thickened basally; anthers affixed to the style branches. Ovary inferior, 3-carpellate, 3-celled; styles slender below, thickened above, dividing toward anther apex into 3 branches each either bearing paired acute crests with a transverse stigma, or bilobed to truncate and apically stigmatic.

Fruit: Capsules globose to cylindrical; truncate. Seeds irregularly rounded to angular.

Ploidy:

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