Stachytarpheta Vahl

Annual or perennial herbs or low shrubs, glabrous throughout or villous with simple trichomes. Leaves opposite or alternate, dentate, often rugose. Inflores-cences terminal, spicate, the spikes elongate or abbreviated, densely or loosely many-flowered, occasionally few-flowered, the flowers sessile or semi-immersed in furrows in the rachis of the spike, each solitary in the axil of a bract; bracts small and narrow, appressed or spreading, or large and ovate or lanceolate, often rigid and imbricate, persistent. Flowers with the calyx long, narrowly tubular, mem-branous or herbaceous, 5-costate, 5-lobed, or 5-dentate apically, the teeth equal or unequal, unchanged in fruit or sometimes variously split in age; corolla white, blue, purple, or red, gamopetalous, usually hypocrateriform, the tube cylindric, straight or incurved, slender throughout or ampliate apically, the limb spreading, 5-parted, the lobes broad, often orbicular, obtuse or retuse apically, equal or more or less unequal; perfect stamens 2, anterior, inserted above the middle of the corolla-tube, included, the filaments short, the anthers unappendaged, the thecae divergent and dehiscing in one continuous line, staminodes 2, posterior, small or minute; ovary 2-loculed, each locule 1-ovuled, the ovule attached laterally near the base of the locule, the style elongate, filiform, the stigma terminal, orbicular, capitate or subcapitate. Fruits oblong-linear, dry, included by the fruiting-calyx, splitting at maturity into 2 long, hard, narrow, truncate, 1-seeded cocci; seeds erect, linear, without endosperm.