Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small palms 4–6 m tall.

Stems: Trunk slender, ca. 18–20 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Spirally arranged, the crown open, with ca. 20 leaves. Blades ca. 85 cm long from ligule to apex. Surfaces green, almost flat (irrespective of plication), lower surface with pale, membranous, elliptic, fimbriate lepidia, later subglabrate, leaf segments lax, flexible, drooping in older leaves. Veins parallel. Petioles ca. 1 m long, densely yellowish brown tomentose in lower ⅓, the remaining portion pale from a close coating of lepidia, finally subglabrate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences about equaling to shorter than petioles, panicles shorter than peduncular part, ca. 14 cm long, glabrous throughout; rachillae glabrous; each flower subtended by a setaceous bracteole; prophyll and peduncular bracts very sparsely and inconspicuously lepidote, usually glabrate. Flowers bisexual (perfect), sessile. Calyx barrel shaped, ca. 3 mm long, perceptibly 3– toothed, the several nerves barely visible where they converge to the teeth. 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, with the broad–based styles connate above into a trigonous column tapering to a shallowly trifid stigma; ovules anatropous, erect, attached at the base of the placenta.

Fruit: Fruit black; obovoid; 1.7–2.3 cm long; 1.4–1.8 cm in diameter. 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: Apparently rare in mesic valleys.

Elevation Range: ca. 160 m.