Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Unbranched trees up to 4.5 m tall.

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

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. The spherical crown typically contains about thirty ascending, spreading to drooping leaves. Blades 91 cm wide and long somewhat oval–shaped, blades nearly flat. Surfaces green above and silvery grayish white below. Margins divided about one–half into fifty to sixty slightly drooping to mostly stiff–tipped segments. Veins parallel. Petioles 91–152 cm long, the latter sparsely to moderately covered along the edges at the base with fibers. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in ascending to drooping and unbranched inflorescences. Inflorescences shorter than to about equal the leaf stalks but expand so that the fruit stalks are equal or are longer than the leaf stalks but are shorter than the leaf blades. Flower and fruit branchlets are 15 to 25 cm long and hairless. 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; obovoid; 4 cm long x 2 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 and very wet forest on unusually steep slopes and sometimes nearly vertical cliffs in low; scrubby forest with many shrubby plants; herbs; and grasses; and the palms are nearly always in the open and much exposed.

Elevation Range: 300–792 m.