PEDALIACEAE  

Woody lianes or sometimes forming scrambling bushes or thickets; young stems +/- quadrangular; flowering branches bearing strongly curved hooked spines. Leaves paired, petiolate, elliptic, apex acuminate; stipules simple or 2-lobed, deciduous. Inflorescences globose, solitary, axillary or terminal. Flowers not fused, pedicellate. Calyx: tube ellipsoid, free part well-developed, shallowly 5-undulate to distinctly 5-toothed, persistent. Corolla: tube filiform-cylindrical, funnel-shaped at throat; lobes 5, imbricate or quincuncial. Stamens: filaments very short; anthers apiculate, 2-thecous. Ovary 2-locular; placentas peltate, entirely covered with imbricated ascending ovules; style long and narrow, well exserted from corolla; stigma slightly thickened with 2 marks on either side. Fruits fusiform, dry, dehiscent, borne on accrescent pedicels. Seeds small, with long fine wings from opposite ends, mostly 1 from one end and 2 or 3 from the other.

Suffrutices with thick, cylindric to fusiform rootstock and prostrate to ascending, villose-pubescent branches. Leaves opposite, ovate to elliptic, subsessile to shortly petiolate, margin ciliate, repand to remotely dentate, with small scales, especially on lower surface. Flowers solitary, axillary; bracts acicular, with stipitate extrafloral nectaries in axils of bracts. Calyx 5-partite, much shorter than corolla tube; segments linear-lanceolate. Corolla: tube narrow at base, widening gradually, without distinct basal sac; anterior lobe enlarged, forming a distinct lower lip; dark violet. Stamens didynamous; staminode +/- absent; anthers oblong, dorsifixed, without apical gland; thecae parallel, dehiscing longitudinally. Disc small, annular. Ovary 2-locular, without indication of false septa; ovule 1 per locule, erect, basal; style filiform; stigma shortly bifid. Fruit nut-like, reminiscent of a walnut, broadly oblong in outline to subovoid, tuberculate and with a weak median rib, indehiscent or very tardily apically dehiscent, +/- 1-locular due to reduction of septum. Seeds 2, obovate, somewhat compressed, smooth, sometimes with narrowly winged margin.