Shrubs or subshrubs, upright or sprawling, sometimes intricately branched and spinescent, generally leafy and evergreen or sometimes at least partly dry-season deciduous, glabrous, or pubescent with glandular or non-glandular hairs. Leaves alternate or rarely clustered, simple. Inflorescence cyme-, raceme-or panicle-like, rarely of solitary flowers, terminal and axillary, leafy or not so. Flowers bisexual, slightly zygomorphic, each mostly subtended by a pair of opposite bracts. Calyx funnel-shaped, campanulate or cupular, 5-lobed. Corolla regular or slightly zygomorphic, with funnel-shaped tube and spreading limb of long, narrow lobes, white, cream, pale green or yellow, with dark, variously coloured striations in tube; limb 5-lobed, the lobes induplicate-imbricate with involute margins in bud. Stamens 4, didynamous or subequal (a staminode sometimes present), inserted at base of corolla-tube and included within it; anthers bilocular, not cohering, dorsifixed, the locules adhering dorsally above the filament insertion, somewhat divergent basally, dehiscing by longitudinal slits. Ovary bilocular, surrounded at base by a fleshy, moist, annular disc; style included; stigma capitate, very shortly bilobed. Fruit a smooth capsule, opening from apex by 2 bifid valves, the lower part enclosed by the persistent, non-accrescent calyx. Seeds few to many, subreniform, with reticulate testa.
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