Annual herbs; roots fibrous; stems erect. Leaves simple, exstipulate, alternate, sessile to shortly petiolate, pinnately veined and usually serrate to dentate. Inflo-rescences loosely racemose, slightly to strongly secund, the flowers inverted at an-thesis; pedicels filiform, spreading-ascendant, often upturned, ebracteolate, borne in the axils of foliaceous bracts. Flowers with the hypanthium shallowly cup shaped to obconic; calyx lobes linear, triangular, elliptic or lanceolate; corolla bi-labiate, purplish blue to pale or white, glabrous, the tube entire, not dorsally slit, persistent, greatly stretched by the expanding capsule and then becoming scarious and hyaline; filaments equalling or slightly exceeding the corolla tube, connate above but below free from one another and loosely adnate to the corolla tube, the anthers unequal in size with the 2 shorter apically minutely white-tufted, the 3 longer usually apically glabrous. Capsules superior or nearly so with not more than 1/5 its length fused to the hypanthium, dehiscing loculicidally and apically, usually erect or nearly so, bilocular with axile placentation; seeds numerous, el-lipsoid, smooth and shining, 0.5-0.6 mm long.
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