Clausena lansium Wampee

third photo from
Clausena lansium.jpg - 维基百科，自由的百科全书
courtesy of wikipedia

Family: Rutaceae •
Genus: Clausena •
Species: lansium (Skeels) •
Country of Origin: China •
Common Names: Chinese Clausena, Wampee, Wampi, Huang Pi •

I grew this from a seedling my friend Gene from the Rare Fruit & Vegetable Council of Broward (RFVC for short) gave me. It's starting to really take off this year. It is about four years old. I have it growing on the south side of my house where it gets full sun all day. It's fruits are brown grape-like fruits which are tart, sweet and basically delicious! Also, the leaves are hairy and have an odd odor. It originates from China where they have numerous cultivars ranging from sweet to sour.

The tree is fairly fast-growing or rather slow, depending on its situation; attractive, reaching 20 ft (6 m), with long, upward-slanting, flexible branches, and gray-brown bark rough to the touch. Its evergreen, spirally-arranged, resinous leaves are 4 to 12 in (10-30 cm) long, pinnate, with 7 to 15 alternate, elliptic or elliptic-ovate leaflets 2 3/4 to 4 in (7-10 cm) long, oblique at the base, wavy-margined and shallowly toothed; thin, minutely hairy on the veins above and with yellow, warty midrib prominent on the underside. The petiole also is warty and hairy. The sweet-scented, 4- to 5-parted flowers are whitish or yellowish-green, about 1/2 in (1.25 cm) wide, and borne in slender, hairy panicles 4 to 20 in (10-50 cm) long.

The fruits, on 1/4 to 1/2 in (0.6-1.25 cm) stalks, hang in showy, loose clusters of several strands. The wampee may be round, or conical-oblong, up to 1 in (2.5 cm) long, with 5 faint, pale ridges extending a short distance down from the apex. The thin, pliable but tough rind is light brownish-yellow, minutely hairy and dotted with tiny, raised, brown oil glands. It is easily peeled and too resinous to be eaten. The flesh, faintly divided into 5 segments, is yellowish-white or colorless, grapelike, mucilaginous, juicy, pleasantly sweet, subacid, or sour. There may be 1 to 5 oblong, thickish seeds 1/2 to 5/8 in (1.25-1.6 cm) long, bright-green with one brown tip.
excerpt from
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/wampee.html


Clausena lansium Wampee by Eric Bronson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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