Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Medium-sized palms 4–5(–8) m tall.

Stems: Trunk brownish, smooth, 30–45 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. The spherical crown typically contains up to thirty ascending, spreading to drooping leaves. Lower surfaces densely lepidote with appressed, pale greenish to golden, much fringed scales, with long–linear, confluent, gray scales giving the leaf an ashy–gray appearance. Veins parallel. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers spirally arranged, in inflorescences 3–4 mm long, shorter than or exceeding the leaves and long–drooping in fruit, branching into (1–)3–5 panicles, these 15–23.5 cm long, 42–44 cm long and covered with a dark rusty brown tomentum, only the lowermost panicle branches divided into 2–3 branchlets; rachillae minutely villous, covered with a rufous to salmon-colored tomentum; prophyll and peduncular bracts usually lepidote, broadly triangular from a tubular base, densely covered with a coarse reddish brown to whitish tomentum. 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 obovoid or ellipsoid and pyriform; (2–)3–3.5(–4) cm long; ca. 1.6–2.5 cm wide. 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 open; wet forest; beyond the ridge that terminates the Powerline Trail; Kaua'i.

Elevation Range: 500–750 m.