Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small trees to 12–15 m tall, openly branched.

Stems: Branchlets rather thick, distal internodes becoming very short, rarely congested to aggregate nodes, youngest growth brown tomentulose, glabrate.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Opposite or distally some of them somewhat alternate. Blades oblong to occasionally ovate–elliptic or broadly elliptic, 10–28(–31) cm long, 5–10(–16) cm wide. Apex obtuse or rarely bluntly acute or rounded. Base abruptly contracted, rounded to subtruncate, the sides often unequal. Surfaces glabrate; blades thick and chartaceous to usually coriaceous. Margins entire to sinuate. Primary lateral veins 9–12 pairs, conspicuous, forking and anastomosing toward margins, tertiary and higher order venation faint but visible, forming areolae of several orders. Petioles 2–6 cm long, stout, tomentulose, becoming glabrate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in long–pedunculate, globose to hemispherical, axillary cymes (4–)6–10 cm long at anthesis, elongating up to rarely 20 cm long in fruit, densely to moderately brown tomentose, main branching thyrsoid to umbelloid, branched portion of cyme usually globose, branching of cymules more irregular. Flowers unisexual, weakly fragrant, short–pedicellate to sessile. Calyx of staminate flowers densely tomentose, brownish, tube prismatic to cylindrical, occasionally somewhat ampliate upward, 3–5 mm long, lobes oblong, 2–4 mm long, 1–2 mm wide, recurved, tomentose externally, glabrous within; Calyx of pistillate flowers similar to that of staminate flowers, but soon elongating. Corolla (petals) absent. Staminate flowers Stamens (10–)15– 28(–30), exserted, from once to twice the length of perianth tube; anthers orbicular; pistillate flower staminodia usually included, occasionally sterile anthers visible in perianth throat, very rarely exserted so that flowers resemble staminate except that anthers are sterile, though dehiscent. Ovary superior. Staminate flowers pistillode usually included but in some specimens exserted to as much as half the length of the stamens, rudimentary stigma recurved, flattened, somewhat pilose; pistillate flower style glabrous, exserted to length of perianth lobes; stigma flattened, lanceolate or paddle–shaped, covered with elongate hair-like branching processes or fimbriate; stigma usually recurved, rarely, even on same plant, shorter, slightly branched and spreading, but abundantly covered with hair-like processes, but in some specimens straight and erect.

Fruit: Anthocarps prismatic; 3–6.5 cm long (erroneously reported in literature to be 37.5 cm long); up to 7.5 mm in diameter at widest part; ca. 1 cm above base; upper one–third to one–half usually; but not always; tapering to a slender sterile rostrum; crowned by the erect persistent lobes; the 5 angles smooth but very glutinous. Seeds 1 per fruit; closely enclosed by the thin ovary wall.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Dry to mesic forest; usually on slopes or in gulches; rarely in wet gulches.

Elevation Range: 260–1,040 m.