Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Unbranched tree up to 20 m tall.

Stems: Trunk smooth, grayish up to 25.4 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. The spherical crown typically contains up to thirty ascending, spreading to drooping leaves. Blades 122 cm long and 183 cm wide slightly wavy. Surfaces glossy green above and below. Margins deeply divided about two–fifths into as many as seventy pendulous–tipped segments. Veins parallel. Petioles ca. 122 cm long leaf with moderate to abundant hairlike fibers along the edges at the base. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences with up to three long primary branches that about equal the leaf stalks in length but expand slightly so that the fruit stalks are longer than the leaf stalks but shorter than the leaf blades. When heavily laden, the fruit stalks hang down below the leaves, often resting against the skirt of old, persistent dead leaves. Flower and fruit branchlets are moderately thick, conspicuously zigzagging, 12.7 cm long, and without 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. Ovary superior; carpels 3, normally only 1 maturing, coherent only basally; ovules 1 per carpel, anatropous, erect, attached at the base of the placenta; styles broad–based, connate above into a trigonous column tapering to a shallowly trifid stigma.

Fruit: Fruit shiny; dark brown to black; wider than long; nearly spherical about 5 cm long and 5.7 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: Moist to wet forest on a very steep slopes.

Elevation Range: 396–487 m.