Rambutan - male, female or other?

First of all I understand that rambutans take several years to fruit, and probably won't fruit anyway unless they have lots of space and the correct conditions etc but I was curious anyway...

I read somewhere that rambutans can either be male, female or have both flowers. Is there any way to know what your plant will be without waiting until it flowers? I'm patient but that's a long time to wait and see if you have any chance at all of fruit production! Unfortunately not everyone has the space and conditions for a whole forest of rambutans to up the chance of having both male and female flowers :hehe:

 

Quite a few plant species have male and female plants and there is usually amongst them a few that are hermaphrodite, unfortunately I dont think there is any way to tell whether plants are male or female until they actually flower.

Something I found out long ago growing Kiwi fruit from seed.

 

As Rambutans are purely Tropical, not even Subtropical, and as you are aware there would be little chance of the growing to a fruiting size unless you had the same conditions as the Palm house at Kew (or Wisely).
They are normally grafted, air layered or budded as seed would take too long in commecial production and sometimes produce sour fruit. There is no difference between male and female plants as far as looks go.