Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrub, 0.5–2.5 m tall.

Stems: Stems usually branched, erect or ascending, 4–12 mm in diameter, light gray or brown, unarmed, glabrous, with numerous helically arranged leaf scars toward apexmoderately leafy toward apex, latex white, viscous.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate, well dispersed on the distal stem or congested into apical rosettes. Blades oblanceolate, elliptic, or narrowly elliptic, 8–19 cm long, 2.0–5.5 cm wide. Apex acute or acuminate. Base cuneate or attenuate. Margins serrulate or crenulate. Pinnately veined. Petioles terete (cylindrical), 2.0–6.5 cm long, ¼–½ as long as lamina. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences several per stem, axillary, racemose, anauxotelic, racemes 5–20–flowered; peduncle and rachis ascending or spreading, glabrous, peduncle 3–20 mm long; rachis 5–30 mm long; bracts 0.8–2.7 mm long, triangular or deltate (rarely becoming larger, foliaceous, oblanceolate), glabrous (rarely becoming foliaceous, oblanceolate, 18–30 mm long, 3.5–7.0 mm wide, acute at apex, attenuate at base), persistent, each subtending a pedicel; pedicels 8–13 mm long, ascending or spreading, ebracteolate or with a pair of minute knob-like glabrous or commonly pubescent bracteoles at or above the base; hypanthium 4–6 mm long, 3.5–4.5 mm in diameter, ca. 1/6 as long as corolla, broadly ellipsoid or obovoid. Flowers tetracyclic, bisexual (perfect), complete, protandrous, epigynous, resupinate, pedicellate. Calyx synsepalous, actinomorphic; tube adnate to the ovary, forming a glabrous hypanthium 1/10–⅓ as long as the corolla; lobes 5, 0.5–1.0 mm long, 0.5–0.7 mm wide, glabrous, persistent, distinct, triangular or deltate, 1/20–1/2 as long as the hypanthium. Corolla sympetalous, zygomorphic, bilabiate, glabrous, greenish, 14-24 mm long; tube gently curved, laterally compressed, 10-14 mm long, 1.5-2.0 mm tall at base, 2.0-4.2 mm tall above the middle, dorsally cleft to about the middle, with a single small knob at the terminus of the cleft; lobes 5, linear triangular, valvate, spreading, acute or acuminate at apex, dorsal lobes 4-11 mm long, 0.8-1.5 mm wide, 2/3 as long to almost as long as tube; ventral lobes 7-10 mm long, 1.0-1.5 mm wide, usually connate for ¼–1⁄2 their length. Stamens 5, syngenesious, antisepalous, exserted, emerging from the corolla above (rarely between) the dorsal lobes; filaments connate, free from the corolla, inserted on the rim of the hypanthium; filament tube 12–20 mm long; anther tube 1.7–1.9 mm in diameter, short–pubescent at base, glabrous or sparsely pubescent; anthers connate, dithecal, dehiscing introrsely and longitudinally, dorsal anthers 4.5–5.0 mm long, ¼–3/10 as long as filament tube, occluding the orifice of the tube; ventral anthers 3.5–4.0 mm long, with tufts of hairs 1.0–1.5 mm long at apex. Pollen tricolporate, prolate, ellipsoidal. Ovary inferior, 2-loculed, crowned by an annular nectary; placentae axile; ovules many; style slender, terete (cylindrical), with a ring of stiff white hairs near the apex; stigma 2-lobed, the lobes appressed and non–receptive as the style grows through the anther tube, pushing out pollen, after which the stigmas spread and become receptive.

Fruit: Fruit a small purple fleshy thin-walled berry; 5–12 mm long; 5–11 mm in diameter; globose or ellipsoid. Seeds numerous; 0.7–1.2 mm long; 0.5–0.8 mm wide; grayish white; ellipsoid; compressed; dull; transversely rugose (Type G of Buss et al. 2001).

Ploidy: 2n = 28*

Habitat: Mesic forest.

Elevation Range: 260–915 m.