Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Scrambling glabrous climber.

Stems: Stems solid, up to 6 m long.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite, each pair at right angles to next. Blades elliptic-ovate. Apex pointed. Base rounded. Surfaces glabrous. Margins entire. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorecense axillary, cymose, spreading, each flower +/- bracteolate. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx inflated and 5-angled, 5-parted almost to base, white, changing to reddish in fruit. Corolla nearly actinomorphic or slightly irregular, funnel-shaped, red, tube ca. 1" long, slightly to greatly exceeding the calyx, slender, limb 5-lobed, the lobes subequal, spreading; color varies in all shades from dull to bright red, cardinal, crimson, and scarlet; nectary disk often present at base of ovary, annular or developed on anterior side only. Stamens 4(5), in 2 pairs, inserted on corolla tube and usually long–exserted, aligned with the sinuses; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, occasionally 1 theca reduced or absent or the 2 thecae confluent, occasionally the connective elongate and thus separating the thecae. Ovary superior, rarely on a gynophore, 4-celled; ovules 1 per cell, attached laterally; placentation basal-axile; ovules 1 per ovary lobe, anatropous to hemitropous of apotropous; style 1, arising between ovary lobes, projecting, usually cleft; stigmas 2, sometimes 1 reduced and vestigial.

Fruit: Fruit glossy blue-black; drupaceous; globose or obovoid; with red aril uniting 4 stones; weakly 4-lobed; separating at maturity into 4 pyrenes or sometimes cohering in pairs; subtended or enclosed by the persistent calyx; exocarp ± fleshy; endocarp bony or crustaceous. Seeds oblong; with endosperm absent or scanty and oily.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: