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| Distribution |
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Habit
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Herbs, subshrubs, shrubs, or sometimes small trees.
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Leaves
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Leaves opposite, petiolate or sessile.
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Flowers
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Inflorescences axillary and/or terminal, bracteate heads, headlike clusters, spikes (sometimes distinctly secund), or less commonly of pedicellate flowers forming an open panicle; sterile bracts usually resembling reduced leaves often present in compound inflorescences; floral bracts usually different from leaves, persistent or caducous, very variable in size and shape; bracteoles 2 per pedicel, usually small, sometimes absent. Flowers with calyx usually 5-lobed to base, commonly accrescent in fruit; corolla nearly always bluish, rarely white, yellow, or pink, tubular or funnel-shaped, inside glabrous, limb 5-lobed, lobes contorted in bud; stamens usually 4 and didynamous, usually 2 filaments distinctly longer than other 2, anthers included or exserted; ovary bilocular, with 2(‒8) ovules per locule, style filiform, stigma bilobed with one branch longer.
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Fruit
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Fruit a capsule, oblong to narrowly obovoid, sometimes fusiform to narrowly ellipsoid; retinacula strong, curved.
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Seeds
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Seeds (2‒)4(‒16), usually ovate or orbicular in outline, lenticular, flat, usually pubescent with appressed mucilaginous trichomes.
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Chromosomes
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A genus of over 400 species from southern China, Indo-Malesia, to Melanesia.
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Notes
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We herein follow recent molecular phylogenetic studies supporting a single expanded Strobilanthes that includes Aechmanthera Nees, Hemigraphis Nees, and Sericocalyx Bremek. (Moylan et al. 2004; Tripp et al. 2013, Wood 2014) in order to produce a monophyletic genus that is also clearly diagnosed by morphological features. The name is derived from the Latin strobilus, cone, and Greek anthos, referring to the overlapping bracts of the conelike inflorescences in some species in the genus.
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Contributor
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Nancy Khan
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