Chocolate Vine

Chocolate vine is typically set out as a container-grown transplant and establishes quickly once in the ground. It tolerates a wide range of soils, including clay, loam and sand, with good drainage, occasional dryness or consistently moist conditions, and accepts an acid to alkaline pH from about 5.0 to 8.0; it grows equally well in full sun or deep shade and needs 24 to 60 feet of space, doing best when trained on a wire fence, trellis or other support to twine upright, or left to spread as a groundcover.

Because it grows so rapidly that it can be difficult to manage once established, gardeners are advised to prune it heavily and repeatedly to keep it from overtaking nearby shrubs and other vegetation. If cut back hard to the ground, the vine recovers quickly and resprouts.

Chocolate vine is largely trouble-free, noted as resistant to pests and diseases and requiring little or no maintenance on that front.

In favorable conditions the vine's sausage-shaped purple pods ripen and split open in fall, exposing a white, pulpy flesh studded with many small black seeds. The inner flesh is edible and sweet, often described as tasting like a cross between watermelon and cantaloupe, though many find its slimy, mold-like texture off-putting. Fruit set is unreliable, however, since the vine seldom fruits under cultivation and often fails to produce pods at all in cooler climates.

Culinary: The sweet white pulp inside the ripe fruit is eaten fresh, though its slimy texture keeps it from wider culinary use.

Ornamental: Gardeners grow chocolate vine for its fragrant, chocolate-scented purple-brown spring flowers, fine-textured blue-green foliage, and showy purple fruit, training it as a screen on trellises and fences or letting it spread as a groundcover.

Craft: Its long twining stems have also been used for basketweaving.

Chocolate vine is native to China, Japan and Korea. It was introduced to North America as an ornamental plant in 1845 and subsequently spread and naturalized in scattered sites along the eastern United States, from Michigan south to Georgia.