Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Perennial herbs 2–5 dm tall, glandular puberulent and hirsute.

Stems:

Roots: Taproots deep, woody, and glandular.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Usually alternate. Blades oblong to oblanceolate, 2–6(–9) cm long, 0.4–2 cm wide. Surfaces rugose. Margins entire to sinuate. Subsessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers sessile in terminal or lateral clusters of 2–5 bracteate, scorpioid cymes. Peduncles 1–10 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic or occasionally slightly irregular. Calyx persistent, the lobes linear to lanceolate, 2.5–5 mm long, spreading in fruit, glandular puberulent and sparsely hirsute; sepals distinct or connate at base, sometimes to above the middle. Corolla blue, purple, or rarely white, 5–6 mm long, the tube ca. 5 mm long, sparsely hirsute externally; (4)5(6)-lobed, the tube often with scales at the summit opposite the lobes, formed by invagination of the corolla tube, the lobes imbricate or convolute, rarely valvate. Stamens as many as corolla lobes, inserted on the corolla tube, not exserted. Ovary superior, 4-celled, entire, rounded, or 2–4-lobed; ovules usually 4, 2 per carpel, eventually 1 per cell, sometimes fewer by abortion, anatropous, erect, ascending, or nearly horizontal, rarely pendulous; style simple, terminal, seated in the pericarp; stigma with a fertile discoid base and a sterile, apical, often forked appendage.

Fruit: Fruit dry; lobed or unlobed; breaking up into 2 2–seeded nutlets 2–3 mm long; glabrous. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy: 2n = 26; 28

Habitat: Cultivated in gardens and naturalized in low elevation; dry; disturbed sites.

Elevation Range: