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Nephelium ramboutan-ake
In Singapore: Pulasan, 黑毛丹, 野红毛丹
Pulasan is a tropical fruit tree in the soapberry family, closely related to rambutan and sometimes confused with it, grown for its sweet fresh fruit. It needs a humid, lowland tropical climate and tends to bear best after a long dry season.
Nephelium ramboutan-ake, the pulasan, is a tropical fruit in the family Sapindaceae. It is closely related to the rambutan and sometimes confused with it. Other related soapberry family fruits include lychee and longan. Usually eaten fresh, it is sweeter than the rambutan and lychee, but very rare outside Southeast Asia.
The name pulasan comes from Malay: pulas 'to twist' (cognate to Visayan pulas 'to take off, remove' and Tagalog pilas 'to rip, tear'). by how the fruit is opened twisting it with both hands, hence pulasan.
The pulasan is native to Malay Peninsula and other parts of tropical Southeast Asia. Wild trees are infrequent in lowland forests around Perak, Malaysia but abundant in the Philippines at low elevations from Luzon to Mindanao. The tree has long been cultivated in the Malay Peninsula and Thailand; is rarely domesticated in the Philippines. Ochse reported that there were extensive plantings in Java only around Bogor and the villages along the railway between Bogor and the capital Jakarta.
Korlan · Nephelium lappaceum var. pallens · Rambutan · Nephelium xerospermoides
[Contains information from Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Heritage Trees from data.gov.sg (National Parks Board), made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0]
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Pulasan by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
