Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Vines, herbs, or suffrutescent shrubs.

Stems: Stems procumbent to twining, herbaceous toward tips, glabrous or densely pubescent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades chartaceous to herbaceous, usually cordate. Apex acute, obtuse, acuminate to obtuse–mucronate or emarginate. Base acute, cordate to truncate, petiolate, subsessile, or sessile. Surfaces glabrous or pubescent with stellate hairs. Margins entire, dentate, or lobed. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in solitary or in scorpioid, umbelliform, or head-like cymes; axillary, pedicels 5–30 mm long, bracts small and linear or lanceolate, or large and foliose. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic, 5-merous. Calyx of 5 sepals, distinct, imbricate, equal or unequal, variable in shape, pubescent or glabrous; persistent, occasionally accrescent. Corolla of 5 fused petals; petals blue, lilac, or white (red in 1 West Indian species), campanulate or funnelform, deeply lobed, dentate or subentire, glabrous or pubescent; nectary disk small or absent. Stamens 5, distinct; filaments inserted on corolla tube base alternate with corolla lobes, Stamens and styles included (exserted in 1 species); anthers dithecal, usually linear or oblong, extrorse. Ovary superior, 2-celled; ovules 4, placentation basal or basal-axile, anatropous, glabrous or pubescent; style 1, filiform, simple or bifid; stigmas 2, ellipsoid or oblong and flattened; stigma capitate or bilobed or, when stigmas 2, then linear, ellipsoid, or globose.

Fruit: Capsules 2–celled; 4–valved or 8–valved; globose to subglobose; dehiscent by valves; transversely; or irregularly; or indehiscent and berry-like or nut-like. Seeds 1–4; glabrous and winged; or if not winged; then pilose ± tuberculate; endosperm absent or scanty.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: