Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Trees up to 6 m tall with rounded crown.

Stems: Trunk ca 16 cm in diameter, smooth, grayish bark and prominent petiole scars on young branches, glabrate to stellate puberulent.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades ovate to broadly ovate, 5–14 cm long, unlobed. Base openly cordate. Upper surfaces essentially glabrous; lower surfaces sparsely stellulate pubescent and stellate–tufted in the lower vein axils. Margins entire to 7–11-dentate. Petioles 1.5–5 cm long. Stipules obscure, subulate to triangular, caducous.

Flowers: Flowers solitary, borne near the ends of branches, pedicels 2–3.5 cm long; involucral bracts 4–5, green, connate slightly at base, spatulate, 20–30 mm long, 3–7 mm wide, with a prominent midrib, glabrate. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx dark purple, curved–saccate, 4.2–4.9 cm long, irregularly 1–3–cleft, 5-lobed but often opening by 2-3 clefts, sepals connate, the lobes valvate in bud, deciduous. Corolla usually zygomorphic, tubular to rotate or reflexed, the corolla of 5 petals, obovate, dark purple, curved and narrowly convolute with the 2 lower petals shorter and usually spreading or reflexed apically, densely stellate pubescent on lower surface and often on upper surface near apex, inconspicuously veined, 5–6.5 cm long. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column, exserted or exposed apically by the spreading lower petals; antheriferous in upper ⅓–½ below the 5–dentate apex; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, 5-celled; ovules (2)3 per cell, placentation axile; style exceeding the staminal column, with 5 branches, erect; stigmas terminal, capitate or discoid.

Fruit: Capsules woody capsules; subglobose; 5–angled; beaked; ca. 2.3–2.7 cm long and in diameter; densely pubescent; loculicidally dehiscent; mesocarp strongly developed; reticulate; endocarp segments 10. Seeds reniform; 5–7 mm long; matted grayish white pubescent; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Formerly known from a windward; dry slope.

Elevation Range: ca. 750 m.