Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Epiphytic shrubs or trees.

Stems: Stems branched repeatedly, spreading, light gray or light brown, glabrous or rarely pubescent, with numerous helically arranged leaf scars near apex, pith solid, latex white, viscous.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades 10–14 cm long, 3.5–5 cm wide. Apex acute or acuminate. Base cuneate. Lower surfaces green. Margins callose–crenulate. Petioles 3–5 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in peduncle 0.8–1.2 cm long; pedicels 3–4 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect), epigynous, zygomorphic, resupinate, protandrous. Hypanthium 1–1.5 cm long, 1–1.5 cm in diameter, hemispheric or obconic, glabrous. Calyx lobes 1–2 mm long, 0.5–1 mm wide, triangular; apex acute or acuminate. Corolla 5–5.5 cm long, unilabiate, green or greenish white, dull; tube 0.8–1.2 cm in diameter. Stamens 5, syngenesious, alternate with the corolla lobes, staminal column strongly exserted, erect or suberect; anthers connate, dithecal, opening introrsely by longitudinal slits, dark purple or rarely greenish white, the 3 dorsal ones a little longer than the 2 ventral ones, the latter with tufts of stiff white trichomes at apex, rarely so on the surfaces, the tube 1.7–1.8 cm long, 3.5–4.5 mm in diameter, glabrous or sparingly pubescent along sutures and near apex; filaments connate above, free from the corolla, 4.8–6.3 cm long, dark purple or rarely greenish white, glabrous. Pollen tricolporate, prolate, ellipsoidal. Ovary inferior, 2-carpellate, 2-loculed; ovule placentation axile, placentae large; style slender, terete (cylindrical), with a ring of stiff white hairs near apex; stigma 2-lobed, the lobes appressed and non–receptive as the style grows through the anther tube, pushing out pollen, after which the stigmas spread and become receptive.

Fruit: Berries unknown. Seeds numerous; tiny; dark brown or black; minutely foveate–reticulate; shiny; with a straight; short to spatulate dicotyledonous embryo embedded in oily endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat: East Maui; windward slopes of Haleakalā; and Hawai'i; windward slopes of Mauna Kea; epiphytic on <i>Cheirodendron trigynum</i> and <i>Cibotium splendens</i> in montane rain forests.

Elevation Range: ca. 880 m