Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small trees perhaps 3–5 m tall.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades 5–13 cm wide, 5–lobed or 7–lobed with shallow, angulate or deltate divisions. Base cordate to subcordate with an open sinus. Surfaces glabrate except lower surfaces tufted–pubescent in axils of major veins near base. Margins entire or nearly so. Petioles usually as Iong as or longer than blades, deciduous with prominent scars. Stipules caducous.

Flowers: Flowers solitary, clustered near the ends of the branches, axillary, pedicels stout, articulate near middle and sometimes with a persistent bract, terminal nectaries absent; pedicels 3–7 cm long, bracts up to 1.5 cm long, sometimes persistent; involucral bracts 3, distinct or connate basally, entire or lobed, broadly ovate, 25–35 mm long, 15–30 mm wide, shallowly to deeply 3–5 lobed, apex acute to obtuse, accrescent and leathery in fruit. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx composed of connate sepals, cylindrical, 2-5-lobed, the lobes usually falling away leaving a basically truncate tube, tube ca. 1 cm long, the lobes valvate in bud. Corolla zygomorphic, corolla of 5 petals, orangish red, ca. 8 cm long and 6 cm wide, obovate, curved in bud, densely yellowish silky pubescent, reflexed above at anthesis, twisted at base, adnate at base to staminal column. Stamens 5 to numerous, monadelphous, forming a staminal column, staminal column ca. 6.5 cm long, exerted, curved; antheriferous in upper 1/3-1/2, terminated by 5 teeth; anthers monothecal. Pollen globose, echinate. Ovary superior, 5-celled; ovules 1 per cell, the carpels borne in a single whorl or rarely seemingly superposed whorls, placentation axile; style clavate, exceeding the staminal column, unbranched and stigmatically lobed at apex; stigma 5-lobed, sulcate, terminal or decurrent.

Fruit: Capsules depressed–globose to globose; up to 3 cm in diameter; woody; loculicidally dehiscent; apex apiculate. Seeds obovoid; 10–13 mm long; densely reddish lanate; with or without endosperm.

Ploidy: 2n = 24*

Habitat: Formerly endemic to the Mauna Loa area on the arid; western end of Molokai.

Elevation Range: ca. 450 m