Pavonia leptocalyx (Sond.) Ulbr.

Erect or low-spreading suffrutex, 20-90 cm tall, often branched from the base stems slender, terete, yellowish-or brownish-hirtellous-stellate-pubescent to stellate-tomentose when young, sometimes with long stellate or simple patent hairs and sometimes also ± glandular-viscid, glabrescent, ultimately woody and covered with a greyish to pale-reddish-brown finely longitudinally marked bark. Leaf-lamina 1-6 x 0.5-4 cm, usually ± ovate, sometimes hastate-triangular, somewhat angular or subtrilobed, apex usually acute, margin irregularly and coarsely serrate or crenate to lobulate or occasionally almost entire, base rounded to sub-cordate, upper surface usually dark green drying brown and usually sparsely and somewhat harshly stellate-pubescent to almost glabrous, lower surface usually more densely stellate-pubescent to tomentose with a whitish or greyish indumentum and hence usually discolorous; petiole up to c. 6 cm long, hairy like the stems; stipules 2-4 mm long, setaceous, caducous. Flowers axillary, solitary mostly towards the tips of branches and twigs; pedicels up to 4 cm long, articulated in the upper 7 mm Epicalyx of 9-11 bracts; bracts 9-12 mm long, nearly free, filamentous-setaceous or narrowly linear, hispid-setose. Calyx 5-7 mm long, subcampanulate, membranous, scarious-papyraceous in fruit, stellate-setulose to almost glabrous, divided beyond the middle; lobes 1.5-2.5 mm broad near the base, acute or acuminate. Petals c. 16-18 mm long, stellate-pubescent on the outside. Staminal tube glabrous or with small tufts of hairs at the line of fusion with the petals. Mericarps 3-4 mm long, triquetrous, ± keeled dorsally and with 3 weak transverse ridges, not winged, glabrous or finely stellate-pubescent mainly near the apex. Seeds 2-3 mm long, ovoid-triquetrous, brown, sparsely to densely pubescent with very small yellowish or brownish hairs.