Glabrous shrub, 1-3 m tall; branches widely spreading. Petioles 5-25 mm long (shortest on ovate leaves); blades lanceolate-ovate to ovate, gradually to abruptly long-acuminate, subinequilaterally obtuse to rounded at base, 10-27 cm long, 4.5-9 cm wide, the major lateral veins usually 4 or 5 pairs, chiefly in basal half; prophylls prominent, slender and pointed. Spikes erect in flower and fruit, 8-10 cm long, 2-4 mm wide in fruit; peduncles equaling or slightly shorter than petiole; bracts inconspicuously fringed. Fruits green, glabrous, bluntly 3-sided, papillate, the small round stigmatic area weakly depressed; stigmas 3, undifferentiated. Croat 12213. Very common in the forest. Juvenile inflorescences appear with new leaf formation during the middle to late rainy season, with the flowers occurring chiefly during the dry season and in the earliest part of the next rainy season. The fruits begin to develop in the rainy season; most fruits mature in the middle to late rainy season and are still present when the new spikes begin appearing. The species normally has gradually long-acuminate leaves that are broadest well below the middle of the blade. It is in this condition that the leaves of the species differ from the otherwise similar leaves of P. darienense and P. perlasense, which also have lateral veins extending into the upper three-fourths of the blade. Some specimens differ, however, in having ovate-elliptic leaves that are broadest at about the middle and have shorter petioles and peduncles. Though they are included here with P. aequale, these collections (Croat 8719, 10096, 16577) may prove to represent another species. Standley (1933) treated P. aequale as P frostii Trel., a name that was never published.