The chocolate vine, named for the scent of its flowers rather than any relation to cocoa. Reddish-purple, sweetly fragrant racemes appear in early spring, and after a warm summer curious sausage-shaped fruits hang from the stems.
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Akebia quinata is one of the more intriguing climbers we grow. It gets its common name, chocolate vine, from the scent of its flowers — a sweet fragrance that people variously describe as chocolate, vanilla or even nutmeg. It has nothing to do with real chocolate, which comes from the fruit of the cacao tree, but the name has stuck for good reason.
It is a semi-evergreen climber reaching around 10 metres, with attractive rounded dark green leaves made up of five leaflets, blue-green underneath and taking on a purple tint through winter. In mild conditions the foliage stays put all winter; in colder gardens expect it to drop.
The fragrant reddish-purple flowers come in racemes around 12cm long in early spring, which makes it genuinely useful — very few climbers are doing anything that early. After a particularly warm summer you may get the large sausage-shaped fruits dangling from the stems, full of seeds. They are edible and undeniably a talking point.
Grow it in full sun or partial sun on any aspect, in any soil that drains freely, with wires or a trellis to twine through.
Every plant we sell is backed by four decades of growing. Tell us about your garden and we’ll tell you honestly whether this is the right plant for it.
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