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Perennial or annual herbs or shrubs; latex white. Roots fibrous. Leaves petiolate; lamina herbaceous; colleters usually present. Inflorescence usually umbelliform. Corolla rotate; tube very short; lobes free at tips, imbricate or sometimes valvate. Annular and corolline coronas absent; gynostegial corona staminal and composed of 5, distinct, erect or ascending hood-like lobes, basally free from corolla, lacking a conspicuous basal hump; adaxial appendages alternating with hood bases; hoods fleshy, conduplicate, opening apically. Stamens connate into gynostegium, not markedly capitate. Anthers 2-locular, lacking terminal appendage; pollen in linear tetrads; pollinaria with 2, pendulous, ellipsoidal pollinia lacking pellucid germinating mouth; corpusculum oblong; caudicles not winged, not geniculate. Style-head conical-globose. Follicles fusiform to fusiform-ovoid. Seeds flattened, ovate, comose at micropylar end.
Perennial or rarely annual herbs, usually erect, glabrous or pubescent. Leaves opposite or verticillate. Inflorescences umbellate, many-flowered. Flowers vari-ously colored, but generally whitish or purplish; calyx 5-lobed, usually with 5-10 glandular structures at the bases of the sinuses; corolla rotate or reflexed at maturity, deeply 5-lobed, the lobes glabrous within, valvate in bud; corona of 5 usually cucullate segments which are joined to the corolla tube, each segment usually with a ligulate "horn" within, the filaments connate into a tube, the anthers terminated by an inflexed membrane; pollinia oblong, pendulous in the anther thecae; stigma pentagonal or 5-lobed, apically flattened. Follicles usually thick-ened, acuminate, the exocarp usually smooth or sometimes spinose-tuberculate; seeds comose.
