Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual herbs 1–3 dm tall, spreading hirsute below, strigose above.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Basal leaves spatulate, 1–2.5 cm long, 0.4–0.6 cm wide, upper leaves greatly reduced, oblong to oblong–lanceolate. Surfaces pilose. Margins entire. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in open, bractless, scorpioid cymes that uncoil progressively as the flowers open, rarely with a few bracts toward base. Flowers small, subsessile, or pedicellate. Flowers on pedicels 1–2.5 mm long in fruit. Calyx 4–4.5 mm long, covered with short, hooked hairs, the lobes lanceolate, sepals distinct or connate at base, sometimes to above the middle. Corolla ca. 3–4 mm long, yellow, becoming blue, salverform, 5-lobed, with prominent scales in the throat; the lobes imbricate or convolute, rarely valvate. Stamens 5, as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, included in corolla 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 1(2), sometimes 2-lobed, gynobasic, arising from between the essentially distinct ovary lobes, sometimes terminal, often heterostylous; stigma usually simple, capitate, sometimes 2-lobed or 4-lobed.

Fruit: Fruit consisting of 4 nutlets; erect; ovoid; somewhat compressed; smooth and shiny; often with a distinct rim; nutlets dark brown; 1–1.4 mm long; with a wide rim. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy: 2n = 24; 48; ca. 60; 64; 72

Habitat: Sparingly naturalized in dry to wet areas and pastures.

Elevation Range: