Home
Perennial herbs, glabrous or pubescent with simple or glandular hairs. Leaves alternate, rarely paired, mostly simple, entire, sessile or petiolate. Flowers solitary, terminal or in upper leaf axils, bisexual, slightly zygomorphic. Calyx tubular to obconical, 5–lobed. Corolla white or violet; tube slender, elongate; limb expanded, campanulate to funnel-shaped, 5–lobed, the lobes induplicate in bud. Stamens 5, inserted at summit of corolla-tube, 4 in pairs, the 5th shorter, exserted and surrounding style; anthers bilocular, ventrifixed, dehiscing by longitudinal slits. Ovary bilocular; stigma expanded, bilobed. Fruit a smooth capsule, opening from apex, the valves deeply bifid at dehiscence, enclosed by persistent calyx. Seeds prismatic.
Corolla white with a yellow or purple centre, or variously coloured from pink to purple or violet, sometimes bluish, infundibuliform or salviform; tube ± long, slender, nearly or quite straight, the mouth narrow; limb abruptly expanded, broadly campanulate, saucer-shaped or funnel-shaped, often plicate, spreading, slightly unequally 5-lobed; lobes short, broad, obtuse or rounded, with cochlear aestivation.
Ovary stalked to sessile, 2-locular; ovules numerous in each locule on an enlarged placenta adnate to the dorsal line of the dissepiment, anatropous; style slender; stigma reniform, usually enlarged into a laminar, 2-lamellate or crescent-shaped process between or surmounting and usually surrounding the anthers, exserted.
Seeds numerous, minute, scarcely compressed, 3-gonous, ovate or ± elliptic in outline; testa somewhat leathery; embryo subterete, straight or slightly curved, in the dorsal part of the fleshy endosperm; cotyledons usually broad, subcompressed.
Calyx tubular to campanulate, ± curved, 10-ribbed, ± deeply 5-lobed; lobes slightly unequal, narrow, ± linear or lanceolate, acuminate, spreading, with valvate aestivation; in fruit somewhat enlarged, enclosing it or not.
Herbs or sometimes small shrubs, prostrate to erect, occasionally forming mats, ± glabrous to densely clothed with eglandular and also glandular, sometimes viscid hairs; rhizomatous structures sometimes present.
Inflorescences consisting of one or occasionally several flowers in terminal or lateral, subpaniculiform, racemiform or subspiciform cymes; pedicels slender, articulated at the base; bracts single, foliaceous.
Fruit capsular, ovoid, membranous, 2-locular, with a central placenta ultimately detaching at the top, apically dehiscing by 2 septicidal slits, the 2 dry valves often 2-fid.
Disk usually fleshy, cupular or annular, adnate to and surrounding the basal part of the ovary, entire or crenulate, occasionally lacking.
Leaves solitary, alternate, occasionally in pairs and appearing opposite, sessile to long-petiolate, entire; minor leaves absent.
Flowers often showy, actinomorphic or slightly zygomorphic.
Branches herbaceous to ± woody.
