Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Subshrubs or shrubs simple or few branched, 0.5–1.5 m tall.

Stems: Upper stems, branchlets, and petioles densely patent hirsute, appressed strigose or only strigose.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades often orbicular or broadly ovate, sometimes ovate or elliptic-ovate, 5-15 × 3.5-13 cm, herbaceous. Base subtruncate, rounded, cordate, or cuneate. Lower surfaces snowy tomentose, sometimes light green with strigose hairs on veins, or thinly white tomentose; upper surfaces slightly rough and sparsely hispid. Margins dentate from base, apex cuspidate or acuminate. Secondary veins ca. 3 each side of midvein. Petioles 2.5-10 cm. Stipules lanceolate, free or connate and 2-cleft, 7-11 mm.

Flowers: Glomerules (flower heads) unisexual, on specialized, unisexual flowering branches in the axils of current or recently fallen leaves, these paired and much branched, usually shorter than petioles and often congested in fruit, male branches proximal or sometimes absent, female distal. Male glomerules few-flowered, 2-4 mm in diam.; female glomerules many-flowered, 2-3 mm in diam. Monoecious. Male flowers 4-merous, sessile; perianth lobes connate to middle, ca. 1.5 mm, pubescent. Female flowers rhomboid-ellipsoidal, 0.6-0.8 mm; stigma ca. 1 mm. Fruiting perianth rhomboid-obovoid, compressed, ca. 1 mm, strigose on shoulder, base constricted and stalk-like, apex almost without neck, 2-3-toothed.

Fruit: Achenes subovoid; ca. 0.6 mm; base stipitate.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: