Araque

The Essence

"Wettinia praemorsa is a cloud-forest palm of the Colombian Andes, the Venezuelan Andes and the Cordillera de la Costa, ranging from Colombia into Venezuela. Henderson, Galeano & Bernal (1995) describe it as sometimes forming just a single stem but more commonly a clump of up to ten unbranched stems, set on the low cone of stilt roots characteristic of the genus, each carrying a sparse crown of only four to six long leaves whose rigid leaflets bear the jagged, bitten-off (praemorse) inner margin that gives the species its name. How unusual that clumping habit is depends on the source: Rare Palm Seeds calls it the only member of the genus that clusters, but Genera Palmarum describes Wettinia as solitary or clustered, and the IUCN assessor described this species as a solitary palm growing in groups. Its taxonomy has been tangled, with twelve synonyms recorded in POWO across Oreodoxa, Iriartea, Catoblastus and Wettinia. In 2025 Lau and Sanz reported the first evidence of how its fleshy fruits actually move: frugivory, they note, had never been reported for this palm or for any of the other 26 species they count in the genus, but camera traps showed the scatter-hoarding rodent Heteromys catopterius removing tagged seeds and storing them half-buried in caches 6-9 m away, sometimes shifting them between caches, with at least 15% persisting for eight weeks - long enough for some to germinate. No vertebrates were seen handling fruit still on the plant. Locally the hard outsides of the stems are used as posts in construction and for fences; Palmpedia carries a photograph of a ceiling built from the species at Mamporal, Miranda, Venezuela, and also documents seed predation by the bruchid beetle Caryoborus chiriquensis. Growers rate it highly for its appearance, but it remains rare in cultivation."

Described as Oreodoxa praemorsa Willd. in Mem. Acad. Berl. 1804 (1807), page 36, and transferred to Wettinia by Wessels Boer in Pittieria 17: 185 (1988). It was long treated under Catoblastus: seven of its twelve POWO synonyms are Catoblastus names.