Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Erect or decumbent annual or biennial herbs.

Stems: Stems unbranched or sparingly branched.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades lanceolate to oblanceolate. Margins coarsely dentate to pinnately lobed. Subsessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers solitary in the axils of cauline leaves or arranged in terminal or axillary racemes, spikes, or cymes. Flowers bisexual (perfect); Hypanthium turbinate, with a conspicuous rim. Calyx lobes linear, denticulate and ciliate; sepals connate, tube adnate to ovary, 5-lobed. Corolla actinomorphic or, if zygomorphic, then often laterally fenestrate or dorsally cleft, connate, with 5 valvate lobes, white, salverform, the tube straight and entire, the lobes subequal and lanceolate. Stamens 5, alternate with corolla lobes; anthers dithecal, connate, with an apical tuft of hairs, forming a tube into which pollen is shed; staminal column adnate to corolla tube from the base to just below the orifice; filaments distinct or connate above, attached to the epigynous nectary disk or to base of corolla. Ovary inferior, sometimes only partly so, rarely almost superior, 2–5-carpellate, with as many cells as carpels; ovule placentation axile, or when 1-celled with 2 parietal placentas, often crowned with an annular nectary disk; stigmas wet or dry, 2–5-lobed, appressed and nonreceptive as the style grows through the anther tube, pushing out the pollen, after which the stigmas spread apart and become receptive.

Fruit: Loculicidal capsules dehiscent by 2 apical valves; pendent. Seeds numerous; pale brown; minute; ellipsoid; minutely pitted–reticulate; with a straight; short to spatulate dicotyledonous embryo embedded in oily endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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