Erect perennial herbs or slender shrubs; roots fibrous or arising from a stout caudex, perhaps parasitic on other plants. Leaves opposite, often reduced up-wards, dentate, serrate or narrowly pinnatisect and appearing compound, mostly pubescent with simple, glandular or branched hairs, sometimes scabrous, short petiolate or sessile. Inflorescences terminal racemes, the pedicels short, subtended by foliose bracts. Flowers with the calyx cupular or campanulate, 10-nerved, 4(5) lobed to about 1/2 way down, the lobes obtuse, deltoid or linear; corolla showy red, orange, yellow or white, tubular, tomentose outside, and sometimes within, 2-lipped, the lobes short, mostly recurved; stamens 4 or 2 and 2 staminodes, the filaments inserted low on the tube, the lower (dorsal) anthers situated against the upper corolla lip, barely exserted, the upper two anthers situated lower in the tube against the lower side, sometimes reduced to tufts of hairs, the anthers U-shaped, sometimes auriculate or pointed, mostly pilose; ovary 2-locular, narrow, the style slender, the stigma punctiform. Capsule ovoid or elliptical, exserted from the calyx which tardily ruptures, loculicidally dehiscent, the valves some-times beaked; seeds numerous, ellipsoidal or oblong, the testa light colored, honeycomblike.
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