Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Unbranched trees up to 9(–21) m tall.

Stems: Trunks smooth, grayish 15–30.5 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. The crown typically contains twenty to thirty ascending, spreading, and sometimes drooping leaves, 91–122 cm long and wide. Frequently a prominent skirt of old, dead, persistent leaves conceals the upper part of the trunk. Blades conspicuously wavy and folded, diamond-shaped. Surfaces dull to (rarely) nearly powdery grayish green above and below. Margins deeply divided to one-half or slightly more into fifty to sixty occasionally droopy-tipped but mostly stiff-tipped segments. Veins parallel. Petioles 91–122 cm long and sparsely to moderately covered along the edges at the base with hair-like fibers. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in the flower and fruit stalks have up to five relatively short, primary branches that are shorter than to about equal to the leaf stalks. when heavily laden, the fruit stalks hang down below the leaves, nestling against the skirt of old, persistent dead leaves. the rigid, slender to thick flower and fruit branchlets are up to 10 cm long and mostly hairless. 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 shiny; brownish to black; spherical fruits to nearly 2.5 cm in diameter when mature. 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: Found in coastal areas; often in brackish water ponds near sea level and in dry to moist forest at higher elevations.

Elevation Range: 0–700 m.