Deciduous tree 12–40 m tall; bole straight, bark smooth, pale grey or greenish yellow or white, usually with short buttresses up to 20 m high, slash white; ultimate branchlets strongly longitudinally ridged, (3–)5–8(–18) mm thick, pale brown or grey brown, glabrous except the rusty, thickly woolly apex; bud-scales triangular, ± 3 mm long, 2 mm wide, rusty and scurfy when young. Leaf-blade ± orbicular in outline, shallowly (3–5–)7–lobed, 10–24 cm long, 7–19 cm wide, lobes widely based, acuminate, apical lobe 4–9 cm long, 5.5–11.5 cm wide, lateral lobes much smaller, 0.5–3.7 cm long, base deeply cordate, sinus 1.5–6 cm deep, edges never overlapping, glabrous above and below when adult, young leaves scurfy with dense rusty tomentum; petiole terete, sometimes slightly swollen at base and tip, 5.5–15.5 cm long, (0.7–)1–2 mm wide, glabrous when mature, scurfily brown-tomentose when young; stipules caducous. Inflorescence usually borne with the leaves, 1–14 per stem, each 4–11 cm long, 3–5 cm wide, thickly covered in yellow-brown stellate hairs; bearing 6–9 short branches, the lowest 2–22 mm from the base, 4–28 mm long, bearing 1–3(–5) flowers; pedicels 2(–12) mm long; 3 bracts at apex of pedicel, whorled, equal, subvalvate, calyx-like, elliptic, 7 mm long, 3 mm wide, velutinous, outer surface brown, inner purple grey. Flowers yellowish, perianth widely campanulate, 12–14 mm long, 18–23 mm wide, divided into 5 elliptic lobes, 6–8 mm long, 4–6.5 mm wide, indumentum as inflorescence, rusty yellow-brown, with stellate hairs, texture felty. Fruit with undehisced follicles ellipsoid, (5–)7–9 cm long, 3.5–6 cm wide, suture thickened, rostrum short and blunt, 3–5 mm long, stipe absent or very short and stout, 0–7 mm long, surface subscabrid with rusty brown dense stellate tomentum, pericarp woody, 2.5 mm thick increasing to 10 mm thick at the suture; follicle only opening slightly at dehiscence, inner surface glabrous, white, perhaps pulpy at maturity; seeds large, pale yellow, rounded oblong, 15–21 mm long, 10–13 mm wide, hilum ± rounded, 4–5 mm wide, white, lacking an aril, dangling from the fruit on a white thread 1–2 cm long. Fig. 1/2, 8, p. 6.