Plant Profile: Akebia Quinata

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One of our favorite vines for PacNW gardens is Akebia quinata

Akebia also commonly known as the chocolate vine or vanilla vine. But, this beautiful, hardy plant won’t serve up your favorite ice cream flavors. However, it does provide solutions to a number of garden challenges. Plus, when it blooms, it fills the garden with tasty scents — more like nutmeg than chocolate or vanilla to our olfactory senses, but hey, that’s sweet too! And, it might just offer up some sugary-sweet fruit as well.

Akebia quinata flowers form in grape-like clusters, dripping from a tall arbor in early spring.

Akebia is a great climber for sunny or shady spots.

Akebia will tolerate shade. In fact, it will bloom beautifully in even darker garden corners. So, for your darkest nooks, Akebia ‘Alba’ might be your better choice as the lemony-white blooms will help brighten things up.

Akebia ‘Alba’ can brighten up darker corners in the garden.

This vine is (mostly) evergreen in the PacNW.

So, if you’re relying on Akebia for privacy, be forewarned. That’s because cold snaps can defoliate it. And, sometimes they lose some leaves. While other times, they lose all of their leaves.

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And, cold can harm the early flowers.

Plus, if the cold snap hits in late winter/early spring, it may put a damper on the blooms. That’s because the flowers open as early as February. But, it’s tough to keep a good vine down! Even if the cold knocks it back, it’s unlikely an established plant will completely die off. Most just lose a few buds and bounce back fast.

The larger bloom in each Akebia flower cluster is a female, which is what will potentially become edible fruit.

Akebia climbs by twining

So except for training, you probably won’t need to tie it to your climbing structure. Those succulent, winding stems will later take a woody form that fattens up into stiff, hard stems and trunks — like a shrub or tree. And, they will wrap around themselves and anything else they encounter, so plan to prune it regularly, and be on the lookout for tendrils making their way into nearby trees.

As Akebia stems mature, they become woody.

So, Cut those babies out while they’re young and small, or you’ll be in for a tough job with a saw. If vines form into dense thickets when interior stems are overgrown by new growth, songbirds may use those spots for cover or nesting locations. Larger birds, like crows, may harvest older dead wood to use in their nests.

Akebia forms clusters of flowers. Here, many male flowers dangle below the larger female bloom.

And, about that fruit…

And, while it won’t taste like a vanilla shake or chocolate cake, Akebia does sometimes produce an edible fruit. Fruit is formed on the female flowers of the purple Akebia quinata. The white Akebia, however, is more likely to be sterile. So, if eating sugary-sweet, gelatinous fruit wrapped in a casing reminiscent of a hard sunglasses case isn’t your thing, plant Akebia quinata ‘Alba’ instead of the purple. That being said, in the decade we’ve grown Akebia, our voracious vine has only produced fruit once, and the squirrels ate most of it.

Outside the PacNW? Akebia may not be a good choice.

In some areas, Akebia is rated as problematic plant. So, before you plant it, do some research about it for your location.