Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Unbranched tree up to 15.25 m or even taller, sometimes to as much as 23 m.

Stems: Trunk smooth, grayish 20–30 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. The spherical crown typically contains up to thirty ascending, spreading to drooping leaves. Blades 122 cm long and wide and slightly wavy. Surfaces glossy green above and grayish below. Margins deeply divided nearly to one–half into as many as seventy droopy-tipped segments. Veins parallel. Petioles ca. 91 cm long, edges at the base with a few coarse, tan, papery fibers. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in ascending to drooping inflorescences about equal the leaf blades in length. Flower and fruit branchlets are moderately thick, 15.25 cm long, and densely clothed in short, reddish brown, felt like hairs. 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 black; ovoid 1.5 cm long and 1 cm wide 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: Wet forests on steep slopes and ridge tops.

Elevation Range: 487–549 m.