Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual, biennial, or perennial herbs.

Stems: Caulescent or acaulescent.

Roots: With a taproot or fibrous roots, occasionally with rhizomes or adventitious shoots from spreading lateral roots.

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate or sometimes in a basal rosette that is often not present in mature plants. Margins entire, toothed, or pinnatifid. Petiolate or sessile. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers forming terminal, bracteate spikes, racemes, or corymbs. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic, 4-merous, in the leaf axils, opening near sunset or near sunrise. Calyx of (2–)4–5(–7) sepals; sepals valvate. Petals yellow, purple, white, or rarely red. Stamens 8, in two series; anthers versatile, the sporogenous tissue in each locule undivided, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Pollen shed singly. Ovary inferior, as many cells and carpels as sepals; ovules anatropous; style 1; stigma deeply 4-lobed, the lobes linear.

Fruit: Capsules many–seeded; usually dehiscent; straight or curved; terete (cylindrical) to 4–angled or 4–winged. Seeds in 1–2(3) rows or in clusters in each of the 4 cells; small; endosperm absent.

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