Chocolate Vine Akebia quinata
Chocolate Vine is an introduced perennial vine, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 23 ft and blooms Mar – May.
More about this plant
Akebia quinata –commonly known as akebi (木通), chocolate vine, five-leaf chocolate vine, or five-leaf akebia– is a vine that is native to Japan, China and Korea, commonly used as an ornamental or edible plant in the United States and Europe. In its native habitat, it is often found on hills, in hedges, on trees, along forest edges and streams, and on mountainous slopes. Wikipedia →
Chocolate Vine is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 23 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Chocolate Vine :
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (21) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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