Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Climbing annual herbs.

Stems: Stems up to 8 m long, glabrate.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades broadly ovate with a broad basal sinus, 7–15 cm long, 6–17 cm wide, shallowly to deeply palmately 5–9–lobed, the lobes narrowly triangular to ovate. Apex acute, mucronate. Surfaces sparsely scabrous. Margins dentate. Petioles 4–9 cm long. Stipules absent; tendrils in the stipular position 4–6–branched.

Flowers: Flowers in staminate flowers in panicles 20–45 cm long, peduncles 12–30 cm long, sparsely puberulent or glabrous, pedicels 3–10 mm long, sparsely puberulent; pistillate flowers 35–65 per head, sessile on peduncles 4–12 cm long, these elongating up to 15 cm long in fruit. Flowers usually unisexual (and the plants monoecious or dioecious), actinomorphic. Calyx of 5 sepals, inserted on hypanthium. Corolla of staminate flowers greenish white, 5-lobed, 5–8 mm in diameter, glabrous, petals inserted on hypanthium alternate with calyx lobes, usually connate at base, the limb often rotate; pistillate flowers: corolla 3–5-lobed, 3–4 mm in diameter. Stamens in staminate flowers (2)3(–5), inserted at base of hypanthium; filaments connate into a column; anthers curved or flexuous, coherent and twisted in a head, opening by longitudinal slits; pistillate flowers: staminodes absent. Ovary inferior, of a single carpel or 3-carpellate with carpels connate into a single 3-lobed cell; ovule placentation parietal; stigma capitate.

Fruit: Fruit greenish brown; fusiform; 15–20 mm long; 5–7 mm in diameter; obscurely ribbed or compressed toward base; puberulent; long–beaked; indehiscent. Seeds 1 per fruit; ovate; endosperm absent.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Occurring in dry forest and subalpine forest; or alien vegetation; on Lānaʻi; and on the southwestern slopes of the Kohala Mountains; northeastern and southwestern slopes of Mauna Kea; and southeastern slopes of Mauna Loa; Hawai'i.

Elevation Range: 350–1,940 m.