Chocolate Vine

The Akebia quinata vine is both misnamed and misleading in appearance. It doesn’t look like, or smell of, chocolate and although it appears both dainty and fragile, this is the kind of rampant climber that can take over a whole wall in a year or two and leave the gardener wondering exactly where the garage door has gone! It’s even semi-evergreen which means you don’t stand much chance of locating the door in winter!

However, if you have space for this thirty foot by thirty foot climber, or are willing to invest in regular pruning throughout the growing season (and it can outpace just about anything except a Russian Vine) this plant is really quite wonderful, with its elegant collection of five leaflets at the end of every twining stem.

The name probably arose because, when the plant was imported from China, Japan and Korea in the late 1800s, what chocolate there was in Europe was heavily scented with vanilla and so people came to confuse the smell of the chocolate with the smell of vanilla and indeed, the Akebia is gloriously scented with a kind of spicy vanilla scent. They are cluster-shaped flowers in a nice reddish purple shade and they appear in spring or early summer. If we get a hot enough summer then the plants will produce very strange looking, purplish blue, sausage shaped fruits, which can be up to 10 centimetres long and contain a white pulp that shelters jet black seeds. Late frosts can sometimes damage the following year’s flowers so a little protection is valuable.

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