Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs or small shrubs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or opposite. Blades often rugose. Margins usually toothed. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal, elongate or sometimes short, indeterminate spikes, each flower sessile or partly embedded in furrows of the rachis, subtended by a single bract, bracts small and narrow, occasionally larger and ovate or lanceolate, persistent. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx narrowly tubular, 5-toothed and 5–ribbed, the teeth equal or unequal, usually not accrescent. Corolla actinomorphic or slightly irregular, blue, purple, red, or white, usually salverform, 5-lobed, the tube straight or slightly curved, the lobes broad, often orbicular, apex obtuse or retuse, imbricate. Stamens 2, included in corolla tube, staminodes 2, small or minute; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2-celled, placentation axile; ovules 1 per cell, attached laterally, erect, anatropous; style elongate, filiform; stigma terminal, orbicular or capitate.

Fruit: Schizocarps dry; oblong–linear; splitting at maturity into 2 hard cocci; enclosed by the persistent calyx. Seeds 1 per fruit; linear.

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