Little bell

Description

Species of Roella are summer flowering dwarf shrubs or perennial herbs with an erect to prostrate habit. The leaves are alternate, linear or ovate, sessile, often with an axillary cluster of smaller leaves. Flowers are regular, sessile, terminal, and solitary or in groups or heads, bracts are leaf-like. The bell-shaped corolla is white, blue or pale blue, sometimes with darker spots on the inside at the base of each of the five lobes or very rarely yellow or red. The calyx has five lobes, which fuse at the base to form a short tube; the lobe margins are smooth, toothed or ciliate. Stamens are free, five, and inserted at the base of the corolla tube; filaments are expanded at the base forming a dome over a nectiferous disc; anthers are linear and attached to the filament at its base. The 2-chambered ovary is inferior and crowned by the nectiferous disc; the style is rod-like with 2 glands at the base of a 2-lobed stigma. In each chamber are numerous ovules. The fruit is a capsule which opens by an apical plug or longitudinal slits.