Akebia trifoliata Seeds | Three-leaf Akebia
LATIN NAME: Akebia trifoliata
COMMON NAME: Three-Leaf Akebia
Plant Profile
The leaves are the quickest way to identify this species among the akebias, because each is built from three leaflets on a twining stem. The common chocolate vine of gardens carries five, and its leaflets are usually notched at the tip and held more neatly. Three-leaf akebia has coarser foliage with wavy margins, a looser habit, and a fruit that is longer and heavier than its cousin’s, which is the character the Chinese subspecies name was coined to describe.
The flowers are sweetly and faintly spicily scented, and the visitors they attract are not the bees that work most spring blossom but small flies and beetles that move between plants in search of nectar. Because the female flowers ripen first and sit at the bottom of the cluster, an insect arriving on a cluster that has already shed pollen from a neighbouring plant will carry it to the right place. Hand-pollinating with a soft brush, moving pollen between two different vines, is a reliable way to lift a thin crop.
Akebia climbs by twining and can put on several metres in a season, so the honest advice is to give it something substantial rather than a thin trellis. The five-leaflet cousin is already listed as invasive in parts of eastern North America, which is a warning worth taking: keep this species away from the edge of wild ground and away from hedgerows where birds could move the seed.
Science & Biotechnology
The stem and the fruit carry triterpenoid saponins of the akeboside series, the class of compound that gives the plant its soapy bitterness and its place in pharmacy. The dried stem has been part of the Chinese diuretic materia medica for a very long time, and the fruit is used in the same tradition, though the pulp and the bitter skin should be kept apart in any kitchen use.
Uses & Benefits
Before there is fruit there are shoots. Young stems cut in spring while they are still tender are boiled and eaten as a green vegetable, and the long flexible stems stripped of their leaves are split for tying and light basket work, a use that survives in the hill villages of its native range. The vine is also grown purely as cover, trained over a pergola where the scent can be appreciated overhead and the fruit can hang.
Growing from Seed
The whole family has no petals at all, and the chocolate-purple organs that draw the eye are petaloid sepals. The plant is monoecious, carrying both sexes in the same hanging cluster, with the larger female flowers placed at the base nearest the stem and the smaller male flowers crowded further along the stalk. That arrangement keeps the two sexes apart within a cluster and does something useful: the female flowers are receptive before the male flowers of the same plant have shed pollen, so a plant cannot easily fertilise itself and a second vine pays for itself in fruit.
The fruit grows ten to fifteen centimetres long and ripens to violet, and the pulp inside is white with a flavour somewhere between melon and pear. In Japan and in parts of China it is eaten with a spoon, the seeds spat out one by one. Inside there are dozens of seeds, black and glossy, each sitting in its own pocket of pulp; cleaning a handful for sowing takes a few minutes with a bowl of water.
Take seed only from a fruit that has split by itself, which is the sign that it is fully ripe, then wash the pulp from the seeds and sow them straight away in a gritty, humus-rich mix under a light covering. Fresh seed is far more willing than seed that has been allowed to dry, and a cool winter in a frame suits it. The seedlings spend their first season building a root and a short shoot, and they usually begin to twine in their second year.
Full sun to half shade and a deep, humus-rich soil that drains will give the strongest growth and the best fruit. Mulch generously, water in dry spells, and tie in the new stems while they are still supple. Prune in late winter, cutting the oldest stems back to the base and short-trimming the rest. Watch for aphids on the young tips and for scale on shaded stems, and keep an eye out for the vine wandering into a neighbouring tree.
Our Take
If you only have room for one, plant two: fruit needs a partner, and the five-leaflet chocolate vine flowering beside it will do the job while giving you the notched leaves for comparison. The same ripening trick, a fleshy pod that opens to sweet pulp, belongs to the magnolia vine, and for a purely ornamental twiner on the same pergola Chinese wisteria is the more spectacular, if the more demanding, choice.
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