Trees, mostly lepidote with golden yellow, glandular scales 0.1-0.2 mm diam. Pith solid. Leaf buds naked, with a resemblance to hands. Young twigs densely brownish tomentellous, young leaves mostly reddish. Stipules none. Leaves spirally arranged (in Asiatic members), paripinnate; leaflets slightly asymmetrical, the acroscopic side being mostly wider with higher inserted base than the basiscopic side; midrib above flattish with a narrow, raised keel, nerves camptodromous. Monoecious or dioecious. Flowers small, in catkins (each flower solitary) which are often arranged to lateral or terminal panicles, the flower fused with a 3-lobed bract; perianth 4-lobed. Male flowers: perianth often reduced and irregular; stamens 4-13 (in Asiatic members), (sub)sessile. Female flowers: perianth lobes in 2 whorls partly connate with the ovary, the median pair exterior; ovary 2-carpellate, the carpel sutures median, 1-locular with an incomplete, simple (in Asiatic members), transverse septum, sometimes also with an abortive median septum; ovule 1, erect, at the top of the main septum, conical with broad base, atropous, with 1 integument. Style in sect. Engelhardia well-developed with 2(-4) transversal elongate, papillose, persistent stigmas, in sect. Psilocarpeae the 4 stigmas small and sessile. In fruit the strongly accrescent bract forms a 3-lobed, obovate, scarious wing with midribs and reticulate venation and partly adnate to the nut; the central (abaxial) lobe is about twice as large as the lateral ones, sometimes a smaller adaxial simple or irregularly dissected lobe is present. Nut indehiscent, pea-sized; pericarp cartilaginous, mostly hispid with itching hairs. Seed filling the space between the septa; testa forming an even covering of the seed; cotyledons strongly plicate and divided into 4 lobes, later epigeal, radicle superior, endosperm none.
Trees, mostly small or medium but sometimes growing very large, in evergreen, primary dryland forest, apparently not on limestone. In Malaysia they prefer the mountains between c. 1000 and 2000 m, although sometimes found in the lowlands.Though Engelhardia is a regular constituent of the fagolauraceous montane rain-forest in Java, none of the species occurs gregarious or dominant, but in open grassy places they may occur in groups in anthropogenous pseudosavannahs. VAN STEENIS observed on Mt Patuha (W. Java) abundant regeneration of seedlings c. 10-200 cm high in a dense thicket of Eupatorium inulifolium on abandoned cinchona plantations near Tjipadaruum, at c. 1800 m; the seeds were derived from three old fruiting trees which happened to be in the adjacent forest border. See further under E. spicata.Often (always?) shortly deciduous and then flowering. Pollination and seed dispersal are clearly adapted to wind. However, the matter may be not so simple as that. Dr P. VAN ROYEN told me that in New Guinea, where E. rigida is very common, he repeatedly found all the fruiting catkins, shed as a whole, on the ground under the trees.
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