Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Annual vines up to 20 m long.

Stems: Stems puberulent, glabrate, black–spotted.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades broadly ovate–cordate with a broad basal sinus, 7–11 cm long, 9–12 cm wide, often shallowly to deeply 3–5–lobed, deeply lobed specimens with lobes narrowly ovate, contracted at base, coarsely dentate to lobulate. Apex acuminate. Blades discolorous. Margins denticulate. Petiolate. Stipules absent; tendrils in the stipular position 2–branched.

Flowers: Flowers in staminate flowers in panicles 3–7 cm long, peduncles 2.5–3.7 cm long, pedicels 2–4 mm long, glabrous; pistillate flowers 2–8 per head, sessile on peduncles 1–3.5 cm long. Flowers usually unisexual (and the plants monoecious or dioecious), actinomorphic. Calyx of 5 sepals, inserted on hypanthium. Corolla of staminate flowers white, 5-lobed, ovate, 2–2.5 mm long, glandular–dotted, acute, petals inserted on hypanthium alternate with calyx lobes, usually connate at base, the limb often rotate; Corolla of pistillate flowers white, 4-lobed, the lobes 1.7–2 mm long. Stamens in staminate flowers (2)3(–5), inserted at base of hypanthium; filaments connate into a column; anthers curved or flexuous, coherent and twisted in a head, opening by longitudinal slits; pistillate flowers; staminodes absent. Ovary inferior, of a single carpel or 3-carpellate with carpels connate into a single 3-lobed cell; ovule placentation parietal; pistillate flowers: stigma 2-lobed, the lobes ca. 1 mm long.

Fruit: Fruit white; fleshy; ellipsoid; 29–32 mm long; 10–11 mm in diameter; glabrous; indehiscent. Seeds 1 per fruit; ovate; ca. 13 mm long; endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Rare in wet forest; on the windward slopes.

Elevation Range: 1,000–1,600 m.