Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perhaps short-lived perennial herbs, sometimes slightly woody at base.

Stems: Stems 1.5–5 dm long, often many-branched, glandular hispid and white puberulent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Blades obovate to elliptic or oblong–elliptic, (10–)20–60 mm long, (8–)12–26 mm wide. Apex obtuse. Base cuneate. Surfaces finely scabrous. Margins entire. Petioles 0–2 mm long. Stipules minute or absent.

Flowers: Flowers few in terminal and also axillary cymes, pedicels ca. 1 mm long. Calyx teeth 6, ovate, usually with small appendages alternating with the teeth, valvate, appearing as lobes on the floral tube. Petals usually 6, alternate with the sepals, distinct, attached at summit of or within floral tube, crumbled in bud, sometimes absent, unequal, the dorsal pair usually larger; floral tube surrounding the ovary, sometimes subtended by an epicalyx of connate pairs of bracts; pale pink or bluish, drying violet, subequal, ca. 1.5 mm long. Stamens 6–14, included and inserted in 2 unequal whorls near the constriction of the floral tube; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2–4(–6)-carpellate, with as many cells, at least at base, rarely 1-celled, placentation axile, rarely parietal when 1-celled; ovules 2 to numerous, anatropous, ascending; style 1, filiform; stigma slightly 2-lobed.

Fruit: Capsules membranous; ovoid; loculicidally dehiscent laterally; the adjacent wall of the floral tube also splitting along its length and the placenta projecting laterally out of the capsules; 1–celled; 3.5–5 mm long. Seeds 4; suborbicular; ca. 2 mm in diameter; endosperm absent or very scanty.

Ploidy: 2n = 16

Habitat: Naturalized in mesic to wet; disturbed sites.

Elevation Range: 50–935 m.