Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs or subshrubs, occasionally perennial herbs or small trees, usually stellate pubescent.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades often asymmetrical. Surfaces pubescent with simple or stellate hairs. Margins usually irregularly crenate–serrate. Petiolate. Stipules lanceolate or linear, occasionally ovate or suborbicular.

Flowers: Flowers in axillary, terminal, or leaf–opposed, umbellate to paniculate, spicate, or corymbiform cymes, often dimorphic, pedicels sometimes partly connate; +/- with an involucel subtending the calyx, the bracts distinct or basally connate. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx usually green, sometimes red, purple, or yellow to orange, 5-lobed, the lobes usually deltate. Corolla actinomorphic to moderately zygomorphic, tubular to rotate or reflexed. corolla of 5 petals, purple, pink, blue, red, orange, yellow, or white, distinct, convolute, usually obovate or oblanceolate. Stamens 5, opposite the petals, staminodes usually absent; filaments partly connate, usually long in short–styled flowers and short in long–styled flowers; anthers dithecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, 5(–8)-carpellate, with as many cells, the carpels borne in a single whorl or rarely seemingly superposed whorls, placentation axile; ovules 1 to numerous per cell, ascending to pendulous; style exceeding the staminal column, unbranched and stigmatically lobed at apex or branched, the branches as many or twice as many as carpels; stigmas terminal or decurrent.

Fruit: Fruit a subglobose or pentagonal; septicidal or loculicidal capsules. Seeds 1–2 per cell; brown to black; usually trigonal; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: