Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Lax shrubs up to 1(-1.5) m tall.

Stems: Branches and calyces usually yellowish hispid with simple spreading hairs 1-3 mm long, also stellulate pubescent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades cordate-ovate, usually 4-10 cm long. Apex acute. Base cordate to cuneate. Upper surfaces stellate-pubescent or with simple, often antrorsely-oriented hairs; lower surfaces stellate-pubescent. Margins serrate. Petioles ca. 1/2 as long as blades. Stipules filiform, 4-6 mm long.

Flowers: Flowers in dense axillary and terminal glomerules and racemes, subsessile; involucel absent. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx 5-7(-10) mm long, the lobes acuminate, green-margined, sometimes yellowish at base, usually 10-ribbed. Corolla actinomorphic to moderately zygomorphic, rotate to campanulate, corolla of 5 petals, obovate, yellow to salmon pink, sometimes red at base, slightly exceeding the calyx, distinct from each other but adnate at base to staminal column, convolute in bud. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column; staminal column included, terminated by filaments; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, (1-)3-celled to many-celled, the carpels borne in a single whorl or rarely seemingly superposed whorls, carpels usually 5-10 or numerous; ovules 1 per carpel, pendulous, placentation axile; style exceeding the staminal column, unbranched and stigmatically lobed at apex or branched, branches as many as carpels; stigmas capitate.

Fruit: Schizocarps; mericarps 5 1-seeded; pale brown; obovoid; ca. 2 mm long; knobbed but not awned apically; glabrous or with a few apical hairs; dorsal wall smooth; lateral walls tenuous; reticulate-veined; indehiscent; upper 1/3 dehiscent; each valve smooth; usually acute or apically spined. Seeds trigonous-obovoid; brown; ea. 1.5 mm long; glabrous; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy: 2n = 32

Habitat:

Elevation Range: