Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrub to 3 m tall, crown open.

Stems: Stems slender.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Whorled. Blades elliptic to narrowly obovate, 9-15 cm x 3-7.5 cm. Apex pointed to obtuse. Base wedge-shaped. Surfaces glabrous. Margins serrate. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescence a terminal panical, flowers widely spaced, +/- bracteolate; lower nodes leafy-branched. Flowers bisexual (perfect) or sometimes unisexual (and then plants gynodioecious or rarely dioecious); flowers showy, odorless. Calyx bell-shaped, shallowly 5-lobed. Corolla nearly actinomorphic or slightly irregular, 5-lobed, 4 pale, 1 darker, flowers ranging from nearly white with a pale blue lip to bright blue with a deep blue-violet lip; the lobes subequal, spreading, tube ca. 0.25" long; nectary disk often present at base of ovary, annular or developed on anterior side only. Stamens 4(5), in 2 pairs, inserted on corolla tube and usually long–exserted, aligned with the sinuses; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, occasionally 1 theca reduced or absent or the 2 thecae confluent, occasionally the connective elongate and thus separating the thecae. Ovary superior, rarely on a gynophore, 4-celled; ovules 1 per cell, attached laterally; style arising between lobes, placentation basal-axile; ovules 1 per ovary lobe, anatropous to hemitropous of apotropous; style 1, usually cleft; stigmas 2, sometimes 1 reduced and vestigial.

Fruit: Drupaceous; globose or obovoid; 1.25 cm diameter; 4-lobed; black; dseparating at maturity into 4 pyrenes or sometimes cohering in pairs; subtended or enclosed by the persistent calyx; exocarp ± fleshy; endocarp bony or crustaceous. Seeds oblong; with endosperm absent or scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: