Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Unbranched tree up to 6 m tall.

Stems: Trunks with a smooth, grayish brown trunk 20–30 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. The spherical crown typically contains up to twenty–five ascending, spreading to drooping leaves. Blades 91 cm wide and –long wavy. Surfaces green above and silvery grayish white below. Margins shallowly divided only about one–fourth into as many as fifty stiff–tipped segments. Veins parallel. Petioles ca. 61 cm long with few or no fibers along the edges at the base. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescence with up to two long primary branches that are longer than the leaf stalks but shorter than the leaf blades. Flower and fruit branchlets are 12.7 cm long and densely covered with mostly permanent, soft, short, 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.

Fruit: Fruit shiny; purplish black; ellipsoid about 3.8 cm long and 2.5 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: Found in wet and very wet forest on unusually steep slopes and sometimes nearly vertical cliffs.

Elevation Range: 457–854 m.