Commemorating Charles L. Prat-Bermon, a midshipman on Freycinet’s 1817 scientific voyage around the world.
Usually a prostrate, mat-forming annual or perennial herb. Leaves alternate, often 2-ranked, margins entire or toothed. Flowers bisexual, sometimes unisexual and the sexes on different plants, solitary in the axils of leafy bracts near the tips of the branches, 2-lipped and cut to the base on the upper side. Sepals and petals 5. Stamens fused to the corolla at the base. Filaments free from each other for about half their length. Ovary inferior, usually 2-chambered. Fruit mostly fleshy and indehiscent.
Grown as groundcover plants, sometimes as a lawn substitute.
Seed and division.
Prostrate herbs rooting at the nodes; flowers with petals of more or less the same size.
About 30 species from temperate to tropical Asia, Australia, S America, tropical Africa and the Pacific Islands. Australia has 13 endemic species.
Source: (2002). Campanulaceae. In: . Horticultural Flora of South-eastern Australia. Volume 4. Flowering plants. Dicotyledons. Part 3. The identification of garden and cultivated plants. University of New South Wales Press.
