English Lao
Botanical descriptions Habitat and ecology Distribution
| Diagnostic characters : | Deciduous trees, trunk straight, mottled and flaky in thin plates looking like Lagerstroemia spp. Buds and young twigs covered with brown tomentum. Petiole with two petiolar glands at top. Inflorescence axillary, flowers whitish in pendulous spikes. Seed surrounded by orbicular wing. |
| Habit : | Large deciduous tree up to 40 m high with narrow and open crown. Branches deeply ascending to the main trunk and grouping within the super half of the tree. . |
| Trunk & bark : | Trunk straight, slightly fluted at base and with short buttresses. Bark mottled and flaking in thin plates, light brown with more or less rounded scars, inner bark light brown to blackish brown. Wood creamy and lamellated. . |
| Branches and branchlets or twigs : | Twigs terete, young twigs very densely tomentose with fawn hairs, becoming glabrous in mature, lenticelled. |
| Exudates : | Exudate absent. |
| Leaves : | Leaves simple, opposite or subopposite, 7-15 by 6-10 cm, elliptic, apex mucronate, sometimes emarginate or slightly rounded with short mucron, base attenuate to rounded, margin entire, young leaves densely brown-hairy at least along the midrib at both sides, blade leathery. Midrib flat above, primary vein single, pinnate, secondary veins oblique to the midrib, widely parallel, tertiary veins oblique. Petiole pubescent, densely tomentose with fawn hairs when young, with two glands at the top or in the top half of the petiole. Stipules absent. |
| Inflorescences or flowers : | Inflorescence axillary, flowers white, grouped in condense spikes, rachis densely tomentose with red-brown hairs. Pedicel shorter than 0.5 cm. |
| Fruits : | Pseudo achene sessile, 3-5 x 2.5-4 cm, pale yellow brown, completely surrounded by two sub-orbicular wings, the later close at tip or ending in V form, covered with soft dark brown hairs. Frutescence rachis with brown tomentum. |
| Seeds : | Seed 1. |