Drymonia Mart.

Terrestrial or epiphytic shrubs or lianas; stems quadrangular or terete, up to 5 m long when climbing, often with spreading adventitious roots in the internodes; branches present or lacking. Leaves opposite, equal or nearly equal in a pair, membranous or rarely coriaceous; petioles sometimes elongate. In-florescences axillary, of single flowers or several in a cluster; bracts often large and leaflike, or small and inconspicuous, but often caducous. Flowers often showy and brightly colored; sepals 5, often large and colored or leaflike, free or briefly connate at the base, unequal with the uppermost shortest; corolla oblique in the calyx, usually funnelform and broader toward the mouth, spurred or sac-cate at the base, the throat broad, the limb of 5 lobes, usually spreading, rounded, often fimbriate, the 3 basal lobes usually exceeding the 2 upper lobes; stamens 4, adnate to the base of the corolla tube, didynamnous, included, the filaments oc-casionally contorted, the anthers sagittate, broadest at the tip, narrowed toward the base to 2 separate spurs, before anthesis coherent by sides and faces with the spurred bases up, dehiscing by 2 to 4 pores, after anthesis the filaments coiling and the anthers separating; disc reduced to a single posterior gland; ovary su-perior, the style included, the stigma stomatomorphic or 2-lobed. Fruit a fleshy capsule, becoming coriaceous, dehiscing by 2 valves that recoil to reveal a red, orange, or purple interior and a mass of seeds in a pulpy funicle; seeds ellipsoid or fusiform, obliquely striate.