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Botanical descriptions Habitat and ecology Distribution
Diagnostic characters : | Briefly deciduous or evergreen trees often with small buttresses. Bark smooth with some lenticels. Stipules free. Inflorescence of unisexual and sterile flowers packed in a globose head, sterile ones near the stalk, male in the middle and bisexual at the top. Fruit spirally twisted long pods. |
Habit : | Briefly deciduous or evergreen tree up to 35 m tall. |
Trunk & bark : | Bole straight, bark red-brown, smooth with few lenticels, often with small buttresses. |
Branches and branchlets or twigs : | Twigs terete, glabrous. |
Exudates : | Exudate absent. |
Leaves : | Leaves compound, bipinnate, alternate and spiral, leaflets opposite, oblong, apex obtuse or slightly notched, base asymmetrical, margin entire. Stipules falling off early. |
Inflorescences or flowers : | Flowers white, arranged in a many-flowered inflorescence, terminal, unisexual, together with sterile ones tightly packed in a globose flower head, on the same tree, pedicels up to 3 mm long. |
Fruits : | Fruit pods, up to 45 cm long, spirally twisted, splitting open, seeds diagonally arranged across the pods. |
Seeds : | Seeds many. |