Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Glabrous perennial herbs.

Stems: Stems prostrate, rooting at the nodes, usually 3–4 dm long, with numerous lateral branches.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Blades suborbicular, broadly ovate to broadly elliptic, or elliptic, 3–18 mm long, (1.5–) 3–12 mm wide. Apex rounded to acute and usually cuspidate, sometimes some of them emarginate. Base abruptly tapering to a broadly to narrowly cuneate base. Surfaces glabrous, blades thinly fleshy. Margins entire. Petioles flattened, 2–6 mm long. Stipules 1.1–1.7 mm long, connate ⅓–3/4 their length, the distinct portion deltate–ovate to deltate, sometimes 2-lobed; stipules usually bearing mucilage-producing colleters on inner surface that aid in protection of the growing shoot tip.

Flowers: Flowers solitary, axillary or terminal. Flowers insect-pollinated, bisexual (perfect), often heterostylus. Calyx minute, persistent, truncate or (Hawai'i) with 4-5 teeth, these unequal, deltate, ca. 0.3–0.7 mm long, with open aestivation. Corolla funnelform, 2–2.6 mm long, 4-5-lobed, lobes (3)4, 1.1–1.8(–2.3) mm long; nectary disk usually present. Stamens alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted at the base of corolla tube; filaments long exserted; anthers pendulous, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior, occasionally partly so, or very rarely superior, 2–celled, placentation basal; ovules 1 per cell, anatropous; styles filiform, 2-lobed, lobes exserted, pubescent in upper ½; stigmas lobed or capitate, dry or occasionally wet.

Fruit: Fruit drupaceious; rarely dry; orangish red to orange; obovoid; 5–7 mm long; with 2 plano-convex 1-seeded pyrenes; 1.5–4 mm long. Seeds dark brown; glossy; slightly smaller than pyrene; with well-developed oily endosperm; or endosperm occasionally scanty or absent.

Ploidy: 2n = 44*

Habitat: Forming mats in wet soil or in moss mats; sometimes epiphytic on logs; usually in wet forest and bogs.

Elevation Range: 490–2070 m.