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Annual or perennial herbs or small shrubs with a tuberous or elongated rhizome, often blackening on drying. Leaves opposite or subopposite, occasionally alternate or in whorls of three, bi- or pinnatisect with variously incised or entire margins, sessile or very shortly petiolate. Flowers axillary or supra-axillary, solitary or in terminal spikes or (sometimes interrupted) racemes. Bracts leafy. Calyx campanulate or tubular, enlarged or at least broadened in fruiting stage; tube with (4–)5­–11 ribs, rarely with a ventral split; lobes 4 or 5, equal or unequal. Corolla salver-shaped (hypocrateriform), showy; tube straight or curved, sometimes pouched and constricted on one side (gibbous of Hansen) above the anthers; throat and inner side of tube bearded; limb bilabiate; upper lip 2-lobed or emarginate, lower lip deeply 3-lobed. Stamens 4, didynamous; filaments inserted in the corolla tube, unilaterally bearded; anthers monothecal, dorsifixed, dehiscence introrse by a longitudinal slit. Ovary 2-locular, glabrous; style terminal, never exceeding the lower pair of anthers; stigma simple, terete or compressed. Fruits either a capsule or a berry, very variable in shape, sometimes with an oblique beak, sometimes apiculate by the persistent base of the style. Seeds numerous, testa variously reticulate or smooth.