About Diastatea micrantha (Kunth) McVaugh
The stems of Diastatea micrantha are 2.7 - 80 cm tall, either simple or branched. They are 0.2 - 3.0 mm wide at the base, minutely winged, and pubescent with soft hairs evenly distributed around the stem. The pubescence often decreases distally, and they are rarely glabrous. The leaves are pseudo - petiolate, with pseudo - petioles 1 - 22 mm long. The leaf margins are ciliolate and decurrent into narrow wings on the stem. The leaf blades can be purple to green, sometimes green on the upper surface and purplish on the lower surface. The base of the blades ranges from subcordate to narrowly cuneate, and the apex is round to acuminate. The lowermost blades are round, ovate, lanceolate to narrowly elliptic, 2.5 - 11 mm long and 2 - 8 mm wide, with regularly serrate to erose margins, and are glabrous or have sparsely scattered stiff hairs on the upper surface and veins on the lower surface. The upper blades are ovate to narrowly lanceolate, 4.5 - 60 mm long and 2.0 - 26 mm wide, with regularly or irregularly serrate, ciliolate margins and pubescence on the veins of the lower surface. The inflorescence is weakly to strongly secund, with few to 30 flowers per inflorescence. The bracts are linear to elliptic, 2 - 53 mm long and 0.2 - 12 mm wide, and spreading. The flower pedicels are 1.5 - 25 (– 57) mm long in flower, glabrous, spreading to ascending, and often bent upward distally in fruit. The hypanthium is obconic in flower, 0.5 - 0.9 mm in diameter and 0.3 - 0.5 mm in length from the calyx sinus to the attachment point with the pedicel. It doesn't expand much in fruit and is glabrous. The calyx lobes are subequal to equal, one - third to two - thirds the length of the fruit, narrowly triangular or linear, 1.1 - 3.5 (– 5) mm long in flower, green, with entire margins, and are glabrous or ciliate. The corolla is purplish - blue or white; if white, the lobes are lavender or blue, and the nectar guides are yellow, sometimes with green raised projections at the throat. The tube is cylindrical, 2.4 - 4.5 mm long from the calyx sinus to the lateral corolla sinus and 0.7 - 1.1 mm wide at the middle. The dorsal lobes are linear to linear spatulate, 1 - 2 mm long and 0.2 - 0.3 mm wide. The ventral lobes are oblong, sometimes with a mucronate tip, 0.9 - 2.5 (– 3.5) mm long and 0.4 - 1.3 (– 1.6) mm wide. The filaments are 2.8 - 4.6 mm long. The anthers are 0.5 - 1 (– 1.5) mm long, dark purple, either with a downy white covering or appearing glabrous, sometimes with short hairs near the apex of the dorsal anthers, and there are two large and many small white trichomes at the apex of the ventral anther pair. The fruits are narrowly to broadly ellipsoid, sometimes slightly curved at the tip, 3 - 6.5 (– 8) mm long and 1.4 - 2.6 mm wide, light brown or purplish - brown. The seeds are ovoid to ellipsoid, 0.4 - 0.5 mm long, orange to dark - orange. Figures 3 F, S 4 D. The chromosome number is 2n = 14 (Fig. S 5 C).
