Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Terrestrial shrubs.

Stems: Stems woody, unbranched, 1–1.5 m long, unarmed, muricate, or aculeate.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades linear to narrowly elliptic, blades 16–36 cm long, 1.5–4 cm wide. Apex acute to acuminate. Surfaces glabrous, whitish on lower surface. Margins callose–crenulate to subentire. Petioles 1.5–4.5 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences 3–6– flowered, peduncles 15–40 mm long, pedicels 10–22(–30) mm long; hypanthium obconical to turbinate, 6–12 mm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx 5-lobed, lobes connate, forming a truncate or irregularly toothed or lobed sheath, 2–8 mm long, tube adnate to ovary. Corolla zygomorphic, dark magenta, 5–9 cm long, glabrous, the tube suberect to strongly arcuate, dorsally cleft to about the middle, the lobes connate, spreading, rarely erect or all 5 downcurved in the same plane. Stamens 5, alternate with corolla lobes, connate, staminal column glabrous to sparsely pubescent; anthers glabrous or sparsely pubescent, the lower 2 with apical tufts of white hairs, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, coherent but separating after anthesis or connate and forming a tube into which pollen is shed; filaments distinct or connate above, attached to the epigynous nectary disk or to base of corolla, rarely adnate to corolla tube.. Ovary inferior, 2-celled; ovule placentation axile; stigma 2-lobed, wet or dry, 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: Berries globose. Seeds numerous; small; pale brown to black; smooth; shiny; with a straight; short to spatulate dicotyledonous embryo embedded in oily endosperm.

Ploidy: 2n = 28

Habitat: Occurring in exposed cloud swept wet forest along crests; less often in mesic valleys;.

Elevation Range: 450–670 m.