Common Name: PHLOX FAMILY
Habit: Annual, perennial herb, shrub, vine. Leaf: simple or compound, cauline (or most basal), alternate or opposite; stipules 0. Inflorescence: cymes, heads, clusters, or flower 1; bracts in involucres or not. Flower: sepals generally 5, fused at base, translucent membrane generally connecting lobes, torn by fruit; corolla generally 5-lobed, radial or bilateral, salverform to bell-shaped, throat often well defined; stamens generally 5, epipetalous, attached at >= 1 level, filaments of >= 1 length, pollen white, yellow, blue, or red; ovary superior, chambers generally 3, style 1, stigmas generally 3. Fruit: capsule. Seed: 1--many, when wetted swelling or not, gelatinous or not.
Genera In Family: 26 genera, 314 species: America, northern Europe, northern Asia; some cultivated (Cantua, Cobaea (cup-and-saucer vine), Collomia, Gilia, Ipomopsis, Linanthus, Phlox). Note: Leptodactylon moved to Linanthus.
eFlora Treatment Author: Robert W. Patterson, family description, key to genera, except as noted
Scientific Editor: Robert W. Patterson, Thomas J. Rosatti.

Stem: erect, ascending or decumbent, glabrous, hairy, or glandular. Leaf: simple, generally alternate, tips acute, acuminate, or mucronate; basal generally in rosette, entire, toothed, or 1--2-pinnate-lobed; cauline generally reduced. Inflorescence: flowers 1--3 in bract axils. Flower: calyx membranous between lobes, lobes < tube, membranes glandular, splitting or expanding in fruit; corolla > calyx, lobes generally < tube, generally ovate, acute, acuminate. Fruit: spheric to ovoid; chambers 3; valves separating from top. Seed: 3--many, yellow to brown, not gelatinous when wet.
Etymology: (Alice Eastwood, curator in herbarium, California Academy of Sciences, 1859--1953)
eFlora Treatment Author: J. Mark Porter
Reference: Porter 1998 Aliso 17:23--46