Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Miniature palms 1–2 m tall.

Stems: Truck slender, ca. 15–20 cm in diameter, crown open, with ca. 12–16 leaves.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate/spirally arranged. Blades chartaceous, strongly folded (irrespective of plications), ca. 65 cm long from ligule to apex. Surfaces green; lower surfaces rather closely dotted with very minute, orbicular nonfringed, hyaline lepidia, leaf segments rigid except apex flexible and bending in the wind, lower costae fugaciously brown lepidote, soon glabrate. Veins parallel. Petioles ca. 40 cm long, sparsely and fugaciously appressed brown lepidote, soon glabrate and then bright green on both surfaces, except for a persistent marginal band of lepidia. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences about equalling petioles, panicles shorter than peduncular part, ca. 15 cm long, glabrous, lowermost panicle branches slightly sinuous, forked; rachillae glabrous; prophyll and peduncular bracts mule–ear-like, acuminate, chartaceous, very fugaciously slightly floccose; flowers spirally alternate in the lower part of the rachillae, nearly bifarious above. Flowers bisexual (perfect), sessile. Calyx campanulate, somewhat thickened at base, distinctly marked (when dry) by several veins converging to the teeth; subtended by extremely fine, setiform, fugacious bracteoles. 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 globose–ovoid; 2.1–2.4 cm long; 1.6–2 cm in diameter (immature). 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 on cliffs and in mesic gulches.

Elevation Range: ca. 550 m.