English Lao
Botanical descriptions Habitat and ecology Distribution
| Diagnostic characters : | Evergreen or deciduous trees, with steep buttresses, bark slightly fissured. Leaves simple, alternate with petiole slightly swollen at the base. Stipules free. Flowers bisexual. Fruit a capsule, seeds winged. |
| Habit : | Evergreen tree up to 40 m high, 80 cm in diameter, with large and steep buttresses up to 5 m high. |
| Trunk & bark : | Bole often fluted. Bark slightly fissured and pustulate, whitish or whitish-grey, inner bark reddish. |
| Branches and branchlets or twigs : | Twigs terete, smooth or rugose, glabrous, blackish brown when drying. |
| Exudates : | Exudate absent. |
| Leaves : | Leaves simple alternate and spiral, 6-9 by 2.5-4.5 cm, drying fawn to milk chocolate – brown, elliptic or ovate, apex blunt, obtuse, base rounded or acute, margin entire, blade coriaceous, glabrous, shiny at upper surface, decurrent. Midrib canaliculated above, primary vein single, secondary veins obtuse to the midrib, widely parallel, distinctly branching near margin, tertiary veins finely reticulate. Petiole slightly swollen at base. |
| Inflorescences or flowers : | Flowers bisexual, grouped in axillary corymb at the top of the branches. Pedicels longer than 0.5 cm. |
| Fruits : | Fruit is a capsule, 3 - 4 cm long, splitting into 10 chambers, woody. |
| Seeds : | Seed 1.5 cm long, winged and ridged. |