Herbs or straggly, often sprawling, suffrutescent perennials or shrubs. Leaves simple, exstipulate, alternate, petiolate, pinnately veined and usually denticulate or serrulate. Flowers axillary in the upper leaves or reduced bracts and borne on usually bibracteolate pedicels; corolla purplish, red to pink, orange or rarely yellow or greenish white, the tube straight or curved, never dorsally cleft, rarely fenestrate, basally often strikingly contracted and commonly somewhat inflated above; filaments distinct below, basally adherent to the constricted basal portion or the corolla tube, monadelphous above, the anther tube with the opening usually partially closed by the incurved tips of the 3 longer or apparently adaxial anthers, the 2 shorter or apparently abaxial anthers bearing a tuft of stiff, white trichomes, these hairs sometimes in part concrescent into a cartilaginous, triangular, scale-like appendage; corolla, stamens and the nonarticulate style often tardily decidu-ous; ovary apically more or less truncate. Fruits berrylike, globose to somewhat cylindric, leathery or fleshy; seeds numerous, lenticular, 0.5-0.7 mm long, mi-nutely foveate-reticulate, the reticulations more or less isodiametric.
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