Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Glabrous shrubs or small trees 2–5 m tall.

Stems: With copious pale but slightly colored sap.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades broadly ovate, 12–40 cm long, 9–15 cm wide. Surfaces sparsely puberulent when young, soon glabrate. Margins 3–5-angled or shallowly lobed, rarely subentire. Palmately veined. Petioles (3–)9–15 cm long. Stipules minute, absent on mature leaves, entire.

Flowers: Flowers in terminal dichasia; peduncles 4–10 cm long. Flowers unisexual; plants monoecious; staminate flowers with pedicels 1–5 mm long pistillate flowers with pedicels 5–9 mm long, elongating to 10–14 mm long in fruit. Calyx 5-lobed; Calyx of staminate flowers 2.8–3.5 mm long; Calyx of pistillate flower 7–9 mm long. Corolla of 5 petals; petals staminate flower petals greenish to yellowish white, obovate, 5–6 mm long pistillate flower petals similar to those of staminate flowers. Stamens in staminate flower (8–)10; filaments connate below the middle. Ovary superior (pistillate flowers), glabrous, (2)3(4)-celled; ovules 1 per cell; styles connate at base, bifid. Staminate flower ovary absent.

Fruit: Capsules ellipsoid; 2.5–3 cm long and in diameter; essentially unlobed; ± fleshy; eventually drying and dehiscent. Seeds black; 1.5–2.2 cm long; beaked.

Ploidy: 2n = 22; 44; 88

Habitat:

Elevation Range: ca. 460 m.