Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Deciduous, glandular punctate, glabrate trees up to 10 m tall, with prominent petiole scars, pubescence predominantly or exclusively of simple hairs.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades orbicular in outline, 5-lobed, 7-lobed, or 9(11)-lobed with shallow, angulate or deltate divisions. Base cordate to subtruncate. Surfaces glabrate except lower surface densely pubescent at base and sometimes with glands on major veins. Margins entire or nearly so. Petioles usually as Iong as or longer than blades, deciduous with prominent scars. Stipules caducous.

Flowers: Flowers solitary, clustered near the ends of the branches, axillary, pedicels stout, articulate near middle and sometimes with a persistent bract, terminal nectaries absent; involucral bracts 3, foliaceous, distinct or connate basally, entire or lobed, accrescent and leathery in fruit. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx composed of connate sepals, cylindrical, 2-5-lobed, the lobes usually falling away leaving a basically truncate tube, the lobes valvate in bud. Corolla zygomorphic, orangish red to scarlet or brick-red, curved in bud, densely yellowish silky pubescent, corolla of 5 petals, obovate, reflexed above at anthesis, twisted at base, adnate at base to staminal column. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column, staminal column exserted, curved; antheriferous in upper 1/3-1/2, terminated by 5 teeth; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, 5-celled; ovules 1 per cell, the carpels borne in a single whorl or rarely seemingly superposed whorls, placentation axile; style clavate, exceeding the staminal column, unbranched and stigmatically lobed at apex; stigma 5-lobed, sulcate, terminal or decurrent.

Fruit: Fruit an ovoid-acuminate to globose-apiculate; woody; loculicidally dehiscent capsules. Seeds obovoid; 10-15 mm long; densely reddish lanate; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: