Touchardia latifolia is a shrub or rarely a small tree that grows to a height of 1–4.5 meters. The stems are erect to sometimes sprawling, few-branched, and young parts are hispid, quickly becoming glabrate. The leaves are simple and alternate, with blades that are ovate to lanceolate, elliptic-lanceolate, or sometimes elliptic, measuring 16–62 cm long and 7.5–22 cm wide. The leaf apex is acute or acuminate, and the base is cuneate to rounded or subcordate. The leaf surfaces are dark green; the upper surfaces are glabrous with prominent cystoliths, and the lower surfaces are glabrous to sparsely or moderately short-hirtellous or hirtellous, especially along the veins, with the hairs somewhat appressed to spreading. The blades are chartaceous, with crenate margins that are more conspicuous in the upper half. The leaves are palmately 3-veined, with pinnate venation above. Petioles are 1–23 cm long, glabrous, or appressed to spreading hirtellous on the lower side. Stipules measure 4–7 cm long, glabrous to appressed hirtellous. The flowers are in dense, globose, paniculate, pedunculate clusters with small bracts. The flower clusters are arranged on repeatedly branching cymes with one branch suppressed and the middle cluster sessile. Staminate flowers are 2–13 cm long inflorescences, each cluster 1–2 cm in diameter. Pistillate flowers are 0.5–7 cm long in inflorescences, each cluster 0.4–1 cm in diameter. The flowers are unisexual, and the plants are dioecious. The calyx of staminate flowers is 5-lobed, with thin lobes 2–3.5 mm long, hooded. The calyx of pistillate flowers is deeply 4-lobed, 1.5–2 mm long, with hooded lobes, the outer two slightly larger than the others, with glandular denticulate margins that become fleshy, forming an orange, ellipsoid, berry-like fruit about 3.5 mm long. The corolla (petals) is absent. Staminate flowers have five stamens with filaments incurved in bud, elastically reflexed when pollen is shed. The anthers are dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits. The ovary is superior, straight, almost as long as the calyx, pseudomonomerous (one fertile carpel and more or less prominent traces of sterile carpel(s)), 1-celled, with basal placentation. The style is short, and the stigma is spatulate with one face and margins papillate-penicillate. The fruit is an ovoid achene, compressed, measuring 1.5–2.2 mm long and beaked. Each achene contains one seed. It is found in mesic valleys and wet forests between 70-1,200 meters.