Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs, occasionally shrubs or small trees, autotrophic or sometimes hemiparasitic on roots of other plants, rarely parasitic, pubescence usually of various types, the hairs often with basal cystoliths like in the boraginaceae, often glandular, plants sometimes turning blackish upon drying.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or opposite, rarely whorled. Margins entire to pinnately dissected. Usually petiolate. Stipules absent in most species, present in Buddleja.

Flowers: Flowers in determinate or indeterminate inflorescences, usually thyrses, racemes, or spikes, occasionally solitary. Flowers bisexual (perfect), zygomorphic, rarely nearly actinomorphic. Calyx lobes (2–)4–5, imbricate or valvate. Corolla usually bilabiate, cylindrical to campanulate, (4)5(–8)-lobed, sometimes spurred or saccate at base, sometimes absent. Stamens 5, usually only 4 fertile, the uppermost one represented by a staminode or absent, occasionally all 5 fertile or reduced to only 2(3) fertile and the lower pair staminodial or absent; anthers dithecal, rarely unithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, pollen sacs sometimes unequal, sometimes confluent distally and opening by 1 continuous slit. Ovary superior, 2-carpellate, with as many cells, placentation axile; ovules (2–)numerous per cell, anatropous or hemitropous, rarely amphitropous or campylotropous; style solitary, terminal; stigma 2-lobed or entire and usually capitate.

Fruit: Fruit usually a septicidal capsules; rarely loculicidal or opening by pores; rarely a berry. Seeds angular or winged; endosperm oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: