Tropicos | Name - Scheelea H. Karst.

Scheelea H. Karst.

Flora Data (Last Modified On 10/24/2012)

Genus	SCHEELEA Karst.
PlaceOfPublication	Linnaea 28:264. 1856.
Description	Heavy and often massive erect monoecious and polygamous-spineless trees, with long large ascending pinnate leaves that make a great vase-form crown, trunk eventually becoming 15 m. or more tall but often bearing profusely when it is yet short and holding the leaf-bases, the denuded old bole marked with rough circular scars where the leaves were borne: spadices infrafoliar from lower part of crown, at first spreading but soon declined and in fruit usually pendent, the woody deeply sulcate main cymba often as long as a man, axis of cluster simple and bearing numerous simple side branches, in fruit becoming a ponderous hang- ing truss: staminate flowers usually occupying the upper length of the rachillae and pistillates the basal part but some trees bearing only staminates, others only pistillates and the bloom then not showy; floral envelopes 6, the 3 petals in staminate flowers terete and very narrow or even subulate, stamens 6, short and included; envelopes broad in pistillate flowers, imbricate, pistil 3-loculed and stigmas 3: fruit ovate or oblong, drupe-like but becoming a hard body with close fibrous covering and large accrescent calyx, although the mesocarp is mucilaginous at -first, 1- to 2-seeded; albumen hard, continuous; embryo basal.
Distribution	Species above 40, from Cuba and Mexico'to Brazil, Peru and Paraguay.