Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small, prostrate or ascending annual or biennial herbs.

Stems: Stems 1–2 dm long, many-branched, pubescent with appressed or somewhat spreading hairs, strigose or hirsute.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades obovate, oblong, or oblanceolate, 1.5–3(–6) cm long, 0.4–1(–1.8) cm wide. Surfaces strigose. Margins undulate, usually entire. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic or occasionally slightly irregular. Calyx 5-lobed, the lobes lanceolate or linear–lanceolate, divided to base, the lobes linear–lanceolate, 3–4 mm long, margins ciliate. Corolla tubular, (4)5(6)-lobed, the tube with 5 scales at the summit opposite the lobes, formed by invagination of the corolla tube, the lobes imbricate or convolute, rarely valvate; blue or white, 3–4 mm long. Stamens as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted on the tube, sometimes unequal, often with basal appendages; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary superior, 2(4–5)-carpellate, the carpels connate to various degrees, 2-celled, often becoming 4-celled by means of false septa, entire to 4-lobed; ovules usually 4, 2 per carpel, eventually 1 per cell, sometimes fewer by abortion, anatropous, erect, ascending, or nearly horizontal, rarely pendulous; style gynobasic arising from between the essentially distinct ovary lobes, sometimes terminal, often heterostylous; stigma capitate.

Fruit: Fruit consisting of 4 nutlets; nutlets subglobose to ellipsoid; 1–1.5 mm long; tuberculate. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Naturalized in open; disturbed sites.

Elevation Range: 430–1,220 m.