Pyramidflower

Melochia pyramidata, the pyramidflower or broomweed, is a slender, erect, herbaceous to suffrutescent perennial in the Malvaceae (formerly Sterculiaceae) native to disturbed ground, fields, roadsides, and sandy clearings across the warmer parts of the Americas, from the southern United States and Mexico through Central America, the Caribbean, and tropical South America, and widely naturalized in the Old World tropics. Plants grow 30 to 100 cm tall, with wiry, branched, finely stellate-pubescent stems. The alternate leaves are lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate, 2 to 7 cm long, serrate-margined, with three prominent veins from a rounded base and short petioles bearing small filiform stipules. Small five-petalled flowers, 6 to 10 mm across, with pale pink to lavender or lilac petals and ten stamens fused into a short tube, are borne in axillary cymes of one to several flowers. The diagnostic fruit is a distinctly pyramidal, five-angled, five-celled capsule 5 to 8 mm long with sharply winged angles, splitting at maturity to release small reddish-brown seeds.