Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Moderate-sized palms up to 5 m tall.

Stems: Trunk smooth, gray, 15 to 25 cm in diameter.

Roots: Fibrous root system.

Leaves: Leaves simple. The spherical crown typically contains up to twenty ascending, spreading to drooping leaves. Blades approximately 122 cm long and wide, slightly wavy The blades, dark green above and below, are deeply divided to nearly one–half into as many as sixty droop–tipped segments. Surfaces almost concolorous, waxy–glaucous to pale green, lower surface ± with a few scattered, pale–colored, unequal, punctiform or very narrowly linear, rusty scales; blades thin and chartaceous or thick and coriaceous. Veins parallel. Petioles up to 152 cm, having along the edges at the base only a few fibers. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences composed of only 1 or more panicles; rachillae glabrous, spreading, very slender (1 mm in diameter), zigzag–sinuous between the flowers, bracteoles extremely fine, setiform; prophyll and peduncular bracts 3–5, scarcely (inconspicuously) lepidote, usually glabrate, imbricate, tubular in the lower part, and suddenly expanded into deeply concave, mule–ear-like, rigid, chartaceous, quickly glabrous, short-acuminate blade. Flowers bisexual (perfect), sessile. Calyx cupular, shallowly 3-lobed, prominently nerved or smooth when dry. Corolla of 3 petals, adnate basally to the staminal filament tube to about the height of the calyx, the distinct lobes valvate in bud, caducous as the flower expands, prominently pocketed and furrowed within, prominently nerved when dry. Stamens 6; filaments flattened, thickish, connate basally into a tube equaling or exceeding the calyx and surrounding the carpels, then distinct and abruptly subulate, not inflexed at apex; anthers erect in bud, dorsifixed, spreading–erect to versatile at anthesis, oblong in outline, bifid basally nearly to the point of insertion, apex emarginate, the connective narrow; anther sacs longitudinally and laterally dehiscent. Ovary superior; carpels 3, normally only 1 maturing, coherent only basally; ovules 1 per carpel, with the broad–based styles connate above into a trigonous column tapering to a shallowly trifid stigma; ovules anatropous, erect, attached at the base of the placenta.

Fruit: Fruit (full grown yet not totally mature globose; 2 cm in diameter. Seeds distinct from endocarp except at the hilum; shiny; endosperm homogeneous except for a shallow invagination of the seed coat below the raphe; embryo lateral near the base opposite the raphe.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Occurring in mesic valley floors and on slopes and cliffs on the north side of Mount Ka'ala; and on the open; windswept mesic forest on Makua–Makaha ridge.

Elevation Range: 450–980 m.