Home
Perennial glabrous herbs or small half-shrubs, with rhizomes, short leafy stems. Leaves spiral, persistent, entire or denticulate, long-petioled. Flowers in terminal, simple, bracteate racemes, nodding, white (Mal.), actinomorphic or slightly zy-gomorphic. Calyx deeply 5-lobed, persistent. Petals 5, concave, sessile, ± arranged in form of a bell or somewhat spreading, caducous. Stamens 10; filaments subulate; anthers incompletely 4-celled, dehiscing by terminal pores. Ovary 5-celled; ovules ∞; style columnar, thickened upwards, straight (Mal.); stigma truncate or with a shortly 5-lobed stigma. Capsule depressed-subglobose, somewhat pentagonal, 5-celled, loculicidally 5-valved from the base, crowned by a persistent style. Seeds minute; testa lax, produced on both ends.
Herbs suffruticose, evergreen, erect, glabrous. Rootstock long, slender, branched, with sparse fine roots. Aerial stem ascending, not branched, scaly at base. Leaves in a rosette at base of caudex, long petiolate; leaf blade abaxially light green, adaxially green, margin entire or serrate. Scapes long, slender, with scalelike bracts at base. Flowers many, nodding, in racemes. Calyx 5-lobed, persistent. Stamens glabrous; anthers opening by pores. Ovary depressed-globose; style exserted, usually curved distally and dilated apically into a ring; stigma capitate, shortly 5-lobed. Capsules nodding, valves connected by fibers at valve margins. Seeds many, small, with thin testa prolonged at both ends. n = 23, 46.
Pet 5; filaments elongate, slender; anthers subapically attached, opening by terminal pores, the pollen sacs often prolonged above into short tubes; style ± elongate; capsule opening from the base upward; rhizomatous herbs, the few broad, petiolate lvs nearly basal, persistent throughout the winter (rarely the lvs suppressed); fls in an erect, terminal, long-peduncled raceme. 40/N. Temp.
