Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Coarse perennial herbs or subshrubs 1–2.5 m tall.

Stems: Young branches, petioles, and pedicels densely stellate pubescent and often (in all hawaiian collections) also with setose, pustulate–based, simple hairs 0.5–2 mm long.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades ovate or sometimes orbicular in outline, 5–15 cm long and wide, unlobed or shallowly and angulately to deeply 3–lobed or 5(7)–lobed. Base cordate. Surfaces stellate tomentose and sometimes setose on veins. Margins glandular serrate to glandular dentate. Midvein on lower surface with a basal gland. Petiolate. Stipules filiform 4–8 mm long, caducous, leaving an elliptic scar.

Flowers: Flowers solitary in the upper leaf axils or in racemes, pedicels stout, 1-2 cm long not articulate but deciduous at point of insertion; involucral bracts usually 10-14, linear, 10-15 mm long, apex bifid. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx 1.8–2.5 cm long, up to 4 cm long in fruit, stellate pubescent and hirsute with simple hairs, especially on the 10 prominent veins, median vein of each one with an elongate gland above the middle. Corolla actinomorphic to moderately zygomorphic, rotate to campanulate or tubular, lower surface usually densely pubescent, corolla of 5 petals, obovate, not opening widely, pale magenta to rose, more deeply colored at base, 5–9 cm long, distinct from each other but adnate at base to staminal column, convolute in bud. Stamens monadelphous, forming a staminal column, included, maroon; antheriferous from near base; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, 5-celled or rarely appearing 10-celled by a vertical partition, the carpels borne in a single whorl or rarely seemingly superposed whorls, placentation axile; ovules 3 or more per cell; staminal column included, maroon, antheriferous from near base; style exceeding the staminal column, 5-branched, each branch terminated by an expanded stigma.

Fruit: Loculicidally dehiscent capsules; ovoid–apiculate; enclosed by the calyx; 2–2.5 cm long; thin–walled; hirsute; exocarp and endocarp sometimes separating at maturity. Seeds angular-reniform or rounded-reniform; 2.4–2.8 mm long; glabrous or papillate.

Ploidy: 2n = 72

Habitat: Occurring primarily in wet; disturbed areas. However; Sinclair (1885) states that it was once common "in nearly all valleys and sheltered places" on both windward and leeward sides of the islands.

Elevation Range: 90–240 m.