Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Parasitic, annual or perennial, twining vines, attaching to the host by haustoria, appearing leafless and rootless, chlorophyll absent or scanty.

Stems: Stems lemon yellow to dark orange or sometimes yellowish green, usually filiform, juvenile plants with a small root system that rapidly degenerates, at maturity plants not connected to the ground, pubescent with simple hairs.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves very reduced, scale-like. Alternate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in dense, head-like or short, spike-like, cymose inflorescences, ± with subtending bracts. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic, 5-merous. Calyx of (3)4–5 sepals; sepals distinct or connate at base, sometimes connate nearly to apex. Corolla of 5 fused petals, urceolate, campanulate, or cylindrical, (3)4–5-merous, the tube usually bearing variously fringed or cleft scales below stamens, the lobes white or pink, imbricate. Stamens 5, distinct; filaments inserted on corolla tube alternate with the lobes; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2(3)-carpellate, with as many cells, the partition sometimes incomplete, placentation basal-axile; ovules 2 per cell, anatropous; style terminal, simple or deeply lobed; stigmas dry, discoid, capitate to cylindrical.

Fruit: Circumscissile or irregularly dehiscent capsules; sometimes indehiscent and then usually somewhat fleshy. Seeds 1–4; the surface smooth or roughened; nearly without cotyledons; endosperm starchy.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: