Gonocaryum
Content
Description
Dioecious, slender trees or shrubs, ± horizontally branching.
Leaves spirally arranged, entire, penninerved;
Inflorescences axillary, often from defoliate parts of the branch-lets, rarely from trunk.
Flowers sessile or very shortly pedicelled, subtended by 1 or 2 bracts, collected to interrupted, solitary or fascicled, sometimes elongate spikes, or congested to axillary fascicles or glomerules.
Petals 5, valvate in bud, either united up to the lower half and cup-like spreading, or connate more highly and forming a tube, tips inflexed, slightly keeled and sometimes papillose inside.
Ovary sessile;
Seed 1, with a thin testa;
Distribution
Asia-Temperate: Hainan (Hainan present), Asia-Tropical: Malaya present, Bismarcks present, Burma present present, Hort. Bog cultivated, Kwangsi present, Lesser Sunda Is present, New Britain present, S. Formosa present, SE. Asia present, West Flores present
About 9 or 10 spp., all in Malesia, eastwards to the Bismarcks, 2 spp. extending into SE. Asia (Burma to Kwangsi, Hainan and S. Formosa), a 10th unlocalized and cultivated in Hort. Bog., imperfectly known, and possibly 2 undescribed new spp., one in New Britain, the other in Burma and Malaya. Lesser Sunda Is. (West Flores), probably G. macrophyllum (Bl.) Sleum. .
Notes
The spp. in the group with tubular flowers are very close to each other; with the materials at hand their discrimination remains rather unsatisfactory. It seems, that mature fruits allow to separate these species by such characters as form and size of the drupe and the structure of the exocarp and endocarp. Many fruits, however, are found without seeds, and thus possibly not or not always enough developed to show the above mentioned characters.