English Lao
Botanical descriptions Habitat and ecology Distribution
| Diagnostic characters : | Large conifer, often buttressed and with pneumatophores. Leaves dimorphic, needle-like on juvenile and short deciduous shoots, scale-like on long branchlets and fertile shoots. Unisexual on the same tree, cones small. Seeds with a thin wing. |
| Habit : | Large, semi-deciduous tree, often with swollen or buttressed base and pneumatophores, up to 25m, dbh to 1m. |
| Trunk & bark : | Trunk straight, single stemmed, usually with conical crown (spreading in older trees); bark longitudinally fissured, peeling in irrregular strips, brown or reddish; inner bark red-pink. |
| Branches and branchlets or twigs : | Main branches long and slender, upper branches ascending, foliage clustered at ends of branches; foliage branches either long and persistent or short and deciduous. |
| Exudates : | Not known. |
| Leaves : | Two types of leaves can be present, all alternate distichous or helically arranged. Scale-like leaves on long branchlets and fertile shoots, decurrent and imbricate with pronounced abaxial keel, stomata in rows on either side of keel. Needle-like leaves on short deciduous shoots either helically arranged, linear and decurrent or falcate and radially spreading. |
| Inflorescences or flowers : | Monoecious; female cones solitary , terminal of very short branchlets; male cones solitary and terminal, 3-5mm long. |
| Fruits : | Cone pyrifom to obovate, 20-25 scales with tooth-like lobes on apical edge; brown at maturity. |
| Seeds : | Seed oblong, flattened, 5-7mm with single thin wing. |