Alangium longiflorum Merrill
Family
Alangiaceae
Synonyms
Alangium hirsutum Bloemb.
Vernacular Names
| Philippines | Apitan (Cagayan), lilauen (Ilocos Norte). |
| Thailand | Plu (General). |
Geographical Distributions
Alangium longiflorum is found in Borneo and the Philippines.
Description
Alangium longiflorum is a shrub or small to fairly large trees up to 40 m tall (rarely woody climbers). The bole is up to 90 cm in diametre, sometimes with short thin buttresses or stilt roots. Its bark surface is smooth to cracking or flaking into circular scales, lenticellate or pustular and reddish-brown to dark grey while the inner bark is usually pale brown to orange-yellow but sometimes purplish-red.
The leaves are arranged spirally, sometimes distichous, simple and entire or occasionally lobed or coarsely dentate. Its venation is varying from palmate to pinnate and exstipulate.
The flowers are in a sessile or short-stalked, axillary cyme and bisexual. The sepal is gamosepalous where the rim is almost entire or with 4-10 small teeth. The petals are 4-10, valvate and linear. The filaments are usually hairy inside. The intra-staminal disk is well developed. Ovary is inferior, 1-2-locular with 1 pendulous ovule in each cell and 1 style.
The fruit is a drupe, often curved and longitudinally grooved, crowned by a persistent cup-shaped sepal. Seedling is with epigeal germination. Cotyledons are leafy. Branching is dimorphic where the leaves are arranged spirally on the orthotrophic leader shoot and distichous on the plagiotropic branch shoots.
Ecology / Cultivation
Alangium species are found scattered, mainly in primary lowland forest. In Malesia some species ascend up to 1500 m.
Line Drawing / Photograph
References
- Plant Resources of South-East Asia No. 5(3): Timber Trees: Lesser known timbers.
