Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual or perennial herbs or subshrubs, often hispid.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple or sometimes compound (palmate). Alternate. Blades palmately angled, lobed, with toothed or again lobed divisions, or parted and usually hastate at base. Petiolate. Stipules present.

Flowers: Flowers solitary in the leaf axils or in racemes; pedicels short, not articulate, involucel of 4–16 bracts, these sometimes connate basally, caducous or persistent. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx spathaceous, 5-toothed, sometimes irregularly cleft or truncate, the lobes valvate in bud, splitting longitudinally at anthesis and later deciduous with the corolla and staminal column. Corolla usually yellow with a purple or maroon center, sometimes white or pinkish, funnelform, actinomorphic to moderately zygomorphic, the corolla of 5 petals, obovate, distinct from each other but adnate at base to staminal column, convolute in bud. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column, staminal column included; antheriferous from near base to below the 5–toothed apex; filaments terminating the staminal column or borne below a 5-dentate apex; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, 5-celled, the carpels borne in a single whorl or rarely seemingly superposed whorls, placentation axile; ovules numerous per cell, ascending to pendulous; style shortly 5–branched; stigmas terminal, peltate.

Fruit: Loculicidally dehiscent; usually elongate capsules. Seeds reniform–ovoid; usually striate pubescent; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

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