Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Unbranched to many-branched perennial herbs 1.5–20 dm tall, propagating by leafy rosettes or rarely fleshy turions at base of stems, strigillose at least on raised lines decurrent from margins of petioles, mixed with glandular pubescence above.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite, alternate in the inflorescence. Blades lanceolate to ovate, 3–7 cm long, 0.7–3 cm wide. Surfaces usually subglabrous with strigil­lose margins, rarely densely strigillose or vil­lous. Margins serrulate with usually 15–30 teeth on each side. Petioles 1–2 mm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in erect or sometimes nodding inflorescences. Flowers bisexual (perfect), 4-merous, erect at anthesis. Sepals keeled, 2–5 mm long, valvate, strigillose and glandular puberulent. Petals white to rose purple, 2–10 mm long, deeply notched. Stamens 8, in two series; anthers versatile, dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. Ovary inferior, strigillose and glandular puberulent, as many cells and carpels as sepals; ovules anatropous; style 1; stigma clavate or capitate, surrounded by anthers at anthesis.

Fruit: Capsules 4.5–8.5 cm long. Seeds brown; narrowly obovoid; 0.7–1.5 mm long; evidently longitudinally ridged at high magnification; with a short; pellucid beak formed from the connate bases of the bristles of the readily detaching; white coma 6–7 mm long.

Ploidy: 2n = 36

Habitat: Disturbed wet forest.

Elevation Range: