white bird-of-paradise flower

This frost-sensitive, clump-forming evergreen, perennial, herbaceous, plant can grow to 10m tall, with leaves measuring 2m by 0.6m. The leaves are often tattered by strong winds or hail. As the specific name suggests, the flowers are completely white and lack the blue color found in other species. It forms with its branched rhizomes dense, horstartige stocks. The unbranched, slightly woody trunk has marks through the leaf scars. The leaves are spirally distributed on the trunk, and have long petioles and leaf blades. Their simple, smooth-edged, elongated, about leathery, shiny green to greyish leaf blades have a length of up to 2 meters and a width of 40 to 60 centimeters. The leaf blades rip in the wind over time. The clean trunk bears the scars of old leaf-bases. Flowering may take place at any time of the year, but is usually between July and December. It has, like Strelitzia caudata, a simple inflorescence (in contrast to Strelitzia nicolai in which several partial inflorescences are on top of each other). The 30 cm long boat-shaped bract encloses from five to ten flowers which emerge in sequence. The hermaphrodite flowers are zygomorphic and threefold. The three bracts are very different in shape and color in the two circles. The fruit is a woody capsule, splitting into three lobes to reveal black to brown, spherical seeds with a yellow/orange tufty aril. …