Akebia


AKEBIA QUINATA.--Chinese Akebia. China, 1845. This, with its

peculiarly-formed and curiously-coloured flowers, though usually

treated as a cool greenhouse plant, is yet sufficiently hardy to grow

and flower well in many of the southern and western English counties,

where it has stood uninjured for many years. It is a pretty twining

evergreen, with the leaves placed on long slender petioles, and

palmately divided into usually five leaflets. The sweet-scented

flowers, particularly so in the evening, are of a purplish-brown or

scarlet-purple, and produced in axillary racemes of from ten to a

dozen in each. For covering trellis-work, using as a wall plant, or to

clamber over some loose-growing specimen shrub, from which a slight

protection will also be afforded, the Akebia is peculiarly suitable,

and soon ascends to a height of 10 feet or 12 feet. Any ordinary

garden soil suits it, and propagation by cuttings is readily affected.



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