Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs or shrubs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Usually alternate. Margins usually entire. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in scorpioid, spicate or racemose cymes or borne along leafy stems between or opposed to the leaves. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic or occasionally slightly irregular. Calyx 5-toothed or 5-lobed; sepals distinct or connate at base, sometimes to above the middle. Corolla white, blue, purple, or yellow, funnelform, without scales in the throat; (4)5(6)-lobed, the tube often with scales at the summit opposite the lobes, formed by invagination of the corolla tube, the lobes imbricate or convolute, rarely valvate. Stamens as many as corolla lobes, inserted on the corolla tube, not exserted. Ovary superior, 4-celled, entire, rounded, or 2–4-lobed; ovules usually 4, 2 per carpel, eventually 1 per cell, sometimes fewer by abortion, anatropous, erect, ascending, or nearly horizontal, rarely pendulous; style simple, terminal, seated in the pericarp; stigma with a fertile discoid base and a sterile, apical, often forked appendage.

Fruit: Fruit dry; lobed or unlobed; eventually breaking into 2– or 4 hard; 1–2–seeded nutlets. [Fosberg & Sachet; 1980b; Gray; 1862a; Herbst; 1980; i. Johnston; 1937]. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: