Melicope balloui, also called Ballou's melicope[USFWS. Species Reports: Plants.]
Taxonomy
This plant was described in 1913 as
Pelea balloui by
Joseph Rock, who named it after Howard M. Ballou, the proofreader of his book on Hawaiian trees.
It was later reclassified into the
Melicope genus by Hartley and Stone in 1989.
Description
It is a
shrub or small
tree growing up to tall,
with leathery oval leaves up to long by wide, and thrives in wet tropical biomes.
Young twigs are coated in yellow-brown hairs. The female
inflorescence contains 5 to 9 flowers of yellowish green in color; the male flower has never been seen.
The fruit is a capsule about wide.
[USFWS. Endangered Status for Three Hawaiian Plant Species of the Genus Melicope. Federal Register December 5, 1994.] Its new growth were characterized as having yellowish brown woolly hairs and waxy scales, with plant parts later become nearly hairless, grayish and sparser.
The fruit is a four‐lobed capsule wide, consisting of carpels in length, and fused about a quarter of their length. One or two glossy black seeds around long can be found in each fertile carpel.
Flowering was observed from April to August.
As of 2013, this plant is only known from the northern and southeastern slopes of the volcano Haleakalā on Maui, with two known extant populations located approximately apart, one in Pu'uokāka'e and another in Kīpahulu, with the total amount of less than ten individuals. This species typically grows in montane wet forests at elevations between 760 and 1,520 m.
