Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Subshrubs.

Stems: Stems erect or sometimes ascending, strongly quadrangular or winged, the 2 angles or wings below the stipules more developed than other angles or wings, ca. 3–6 dm long, glabrous.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite. Blades elliptic, elliptic–obovate, elliptic–ovate, or sometimes lanceolate, often slightly asymmetrical, (6–)8–18(–22) cm long, (1–)2.5–6.5(–7) cm wide. Apex acuminate to long-acuminate. Base attenuate. Surfaces glabrous, usually paler on lower surface, usually abruptly reduced above, thin, chartaceous or membranous. Margins entire. Lateral veins few, widely spaced, visible but not conspicuous, slightly or not at all raised on lower surface, higher order venation obscurely reticulate. Petioles more or less slightly winged, 0–1(–1.5) cm long, base connate into a sheath. Stipules deltate, 5–14 mm long, adnate to petiole sheath, apex with a slender mucro (2–)4–11 mm long.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal, compound, monochasial cymes, forming a lax, paniculate inflorescence up to 30 cm long, branches lax or pendent, occasionally not monochasial and forming a stiffer thyrsoid panicle, inflorescences glabrous, more or less glaucous throughout, bracts of ultimate branches small, scale-like, pedicels quadrangular, ca. 3–4 mm long; hypanthium turbinate, l-1.5 mm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect) and pistillate; insect-pollinated. Calyx 4-5-lobed, lobes narrowly ovate to lanceolate, 1.5–3(–5) mm long, ca. 1–2 mm wide, enlarging somewhat in fruit. Corolla greenish white, fleshy, salverform, glaucous, the tube 5–14 mm long, larger corollas slightly enlarged distally the limb not strongly quadrangular in bud, but apex depressed, 4-5-lobed, the lobes ca. 1–4 mm long at anthesis, flat, strongly inflexed in bud; nectary disc present. Stamens as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted ca. 1–3 mm below corolla lobe sinuses; anthers sessile or on short filaments, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior or partly so, 2(-4)-locular; ovules few to numerous on fleshy placentas near middle of septum; style as many as carpels, cylindrical to filiform, terminal, slender, glabrous to hirtellous or long–villous in lower 1/2, apex 2–lobed; stigma bilobed or subcapitate, included or exserted.

Fruit: Capsules turbinate to turbinate–subglobose; 2–3 mm long; 3–4 mm in diameter; dehiscing loculicidally across disk; pyrenes tardily dehiscing across disk and slightly further septicidally; endocarp thinly sclerified; disk slightly raised. Seeds dark brown; more or less cuneiform; irregularly bluntly angled; minutely dark granular; with well-developed oily endosperm; or endosperm occasionally scanty or absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Scattered in mesic forest and perhaps wet forest.

Elevation Range: