Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Medium-sized palms, 3–5 m tall.

Stems: Trunk smooth, gray, and inconspicuously ringed with leaf scars, 20–31 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Spirally arranged. The crown typically consisting of up to 20 leaves. Blades up to 92 cm long and 92 cm wide; divided about one–third into as many as sixty stiff–or droopy–tipped segments. Lower surfaces of leaf blades dotted with elliptic, slightly fringed to subentire, elongate–elliptic, yellowish scales. Veins parallel. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences simple or branching into 2 (or up to 4) separate panicles, these short, ca.12 cm long with many simple branchlets, about 10 cm long, the few lower branchlets divided once; rachillae slender and loosely pubescent with grayish to yellowish hairs or palea scattered over the surface; peduncular bracts densely covered externally with a detachable rufous brown to grayish wool, becoming glabrate with age. 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 ovoid to subglobose; (2–)4–5.5 cm long; 3.2–3.5 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: Wet to very wet; mostly low scrubby forest and grasslands on northeastern and eastern slopes; valleys; and flatlands of Pu‘u Kukui and eastern Molokai.

Elevation Range: 300–1220 m.