Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Herbs, annual or perennial, usually short-lived, succulent, usually conspicuously papillate, glabrous.

Stems: Stems prostrate to ascending.

Roots: Roots fibrous.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or opposite; basal and cauline. Blade reddish with age, flat or terete (cylindrical). Margins often undulate. Sessile or petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Inflorescences terminal or axillary, flowers solitary or in cymes; bracts absent or 1–2, sessile or pedicellate. Flowers showy, 4–10[–20] mm diam., tubular. Calyx lobes (4–) 5, 2 often leaflike. Petals (including petaloid staminodia) 20–40[–150], distinct or connate into short tube, free, white, pink, or yellowish, linear; nectary glands 5. Stamens 30[–120]. Ovary half-inferior, (4–)5-loculed, convex; ovule placentation axile; stigmas (4–)5, erect, filiform.

Fruit: Capsules persistent; valves (4–)5; with expanding interior keels when moistened; forming capsule lids when dried; dehiscence loculicidal. Seeds 100–200; black or dark [light] reddish brown [ochre or whitish]; compressed [globose]; often with 1 straight edge; 1 mm; smooth to rough with minute tubercles; arils absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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