Palm trees of the Amazon and their uses

This species differs from the last in its slenderer stem and less drooping leaves and leaflets. It grows to forty or fifty feet high. The spadices are fewer and much smaller. The fruit also is smaller, and has more pulpy matter, so that a small quantity of it makes more of the “vinho d’Assaí” (the Assaí wine) than the same quantity of fruit of the larger kind. The column formed by the sheathing bases of the leaves is smaller than in the last species, and always of a red colour. The roots rise considerably above the ground, forming a distinct cone, which is not the case in the E. oleracea. It inhabits the forests on a dry sandy soil, of the Upper Rio Negro. These districts are called Catinga forests by the natives, and have very peculiar vegetable productions, differing almost entirely from those of the lofty virgin forest.

The preparation of the fruit of this species is sweeter and more finely flavoured than that of any other, and is therefore much sought after, but it takes the produce of four or five trees to yield as much as a single spadix of the larger kind will often produce. I found the fruit ripe in the month of April on the river Uaupés, a branch of the Rio Negro above the Falls.

Male and female flowers on the same spadix, the former most abundant. Spathe double, the interior complete, woody, and deciduous. Flowers without distinct bracts; the male with six stamens and rudiments of a pistil, the female with three sessile stigmas, but with no rudiment of stamens.

These are tall majestic trees with large smooth stems, generally distinctly ringed. The leaves are large, terminal, more or less regularly pinnate, and have the bases expanded and clasping the stem, but not forming a sheathing column as in the last genus. The spadices spring from beneath the leaves and are simply branched; the branches are very lax, hanging down vertically except when forced outwards by the ripening fruit. The spathe is very large, fusiform and woody, and falls off the moment the spadix escapes from it. The fruit is small, nearly globular, and has an edible pulpy covering, like that of the genus Euterpe.

Six species only are known, and all inhabit tropical America, where they prefer dry, slightly elevated lands, none being known to extend more than 1600 feet above the sea.