Cromidon

Small annual or perennial herbs; stems often prostrate or decumbent, leafy, sometimes with axillary leaf tufts (incipient branches, not brachyblasts); hairs on stems, leaves, bracts and calyx with delicately sculptured walls. Leaves opposite, bases often connate, sometimes becoming alternate towards stem apex, usually cauline, rarely radical, elliptical, rarely ovate or uppermost spathulate, petiolate, entire or at times few-dentate, pubescent or sometimes +/- glabrous. Flowers shortly pedicellate, usually crowded into racemose, +/- globose heads or short spikes, these often arranged in corymbs or panicles. Bracts adnate to pedicel and up to half of calyx tube. Calyx usually obliquely and unequally 5-lobed, sometimes 3-lobed but anterior lobes may be retuse or toothed, at least these 2 lobes broadly deltoid, lobes not indurated with age. Corolla bilabiate, 4- or 5-lobed, membranous, persistent; tube funnel-shaped, glabrous; posterior lip (and sometimes anterior lip as well) bearded with minute 1-celled, clavate hairs, 1- or 2-lobed, often with a yellow/orange patch extending down throat, exterior in bud; anterior lip 3-lobed. Stamens 4, didynamous; filaments arising +/- in middle of corolla tube, decurrent down tube; anthers unilocular, exserted. Nectary small, adnate on shorter side of ovary base. Ovary bilocular, elliptic-oblong, base slightly oblique; ovules 1 per locule, pendulous; style filiform; stigma lingulate with 2 marginal bands of stigmatic papillae. Fruit a pair of soft-walled cocci, outer face convex, smooth or rarely slightly rugose, inner face concave, indehiscent. Seeds +/- elliptical, compressed, convex on one face, +/- plane on other, amber-coloured, smooth.