Doing The Splits

Day 353: The first of the Akebia pods has done the splits, revealing a fat cylindrical object which to my mind resembles some kind of sea slug. This is the edible portion of the fruit. Now I am going to ask you to use your imagination. Set the following pictures in your mind:

Imagine watermelon seeds which instead of being flat are egg-shaped, i.e., picture seeds which are roughly the size of watermelon seeds, but they're shaped like teardrops and they're hard. If you're familiar with pomegranate seeds, the seeds in your imagination would be similar, but pomegranate seeds are a little pointier on the small end.

Now mentally put yourself in the kitchen. You're cooking something which requires the addition of either confectioner's sugar or powdered stevia. As you pull open the plastic inner wrapper, you drop the box. A ~poof!~ of sweet dust flies into the air just as you're taking a breath. Some of the dust...not much, just a little...goes up your nostrils. It's not quite enough to make you sneeze, but close.

Ready? Do you have those two images clearly in your minds? Okay, if you were to wrap those teardrop-shaped seeds in a very thin coating of your sweetened, viscid nasal mucus and then were to stick a gob of them in your mouth, you'd get the idea of what the pulp of the Akebia fruit feels and tastes like.

Although the Akebia cross-pollination experiment has come to a successful conclusion, I do not think we'll go down this road again.

The Mating Game

Day 216: Finally, the Akebias are sporting both male and female flowers on each vine! But with SNOW coming down in the rain yesterday and decidedly un-springlike temperatures, they are not producing pollen. I'm not worried. The next several days are supposed to see a dramatic rise in temps and pollen will soon be plentiful. I'll be out there with my little paintbrush tickling plant 'nads!

How do you tell boys from girls? The upper left white flower is female, as are the two large purple flowers. Look closely at the different structures. The male flower is smaller and has stamens, two-part organs consisting of a filament (thread-like stalk) and a pollen-bearing anther. The pollen must be transferred to the female stigma in order for fertilization to take place. Some plants are self-fertile, i.e., either their flowers consist of both male and female parts, or male and female flowers both appear on the same plant. In the case of Akebia, the flowers require being fertilized by another Akebia. In their natural habitat, this job is done by bees and wasps, but in the Pacific Northwest, Akebias bloom too early in the year, before the natural pollinators have emerged. Just for fun, I'm engaging in a little horticultural experiment, playing the role of matchmaker between my two vines.

Purple Akebia

Day 206: The purple Akebia now has a few blossoms open and hundreds more to come, each one about the size of the pink of my thumbnail. For the first time, I detected the scent, although I had to put my nose in a cluster to get a good whiff. I would not describe it as chocolaty; rather, it reminded me of something tropical like frangipani or plumeria. That said, the weather has been cool and flowers are at the peak of their fragrance in warmer temperatures. The next few days are forecast to be warm and may initiate a full olfactory experience. I have also gained a greater appreciation of Akebia's vigour. In just a week, the stems of the white vine have put on a foot or more of new growth, now reaching beyond the top of the trellis. As I mentioned in my post three days ago, Five-leaf Akebia produces a tasty fruit, but does so rarely in our climate due to the fact that it flowers in May before the pollinators have emerged. The next phase of this horticultural experiment will see me out there with my little paintbrush, gathering pollen from one vine and transferring it to the other.

White Akebia

Day 203: Last year, I visited my favourite nursery hoping to find a shade-tolerant vine to crawl up the side of my garage. After a long discussion with the horticulturist, I settled on Five-Leaf Akebia, aka "Chocolate Vine," so called for the scent of the species' flowers. Akebia also produces a 5-inch long edible fruit, but is not self-fertile; therefore I needed two varieties. I bought a white and a purple. What the horticulturist neglected to mention is that Akebia is very prone to powdery mildew, and unbeknownst to me, one of the plants was already infected. By the time I realized the blackening of the leaves was something more serious than transplant shock, the problem was well-established. Some quick research on line told me what I needed to treat it, and I began applying a copper-based fungicide almost immediately.

From looking at the foliage, you might assume that this vine is deciduous. It is not, at least not in our climate. Both plants held most of their leaves through the winter, and about two weeks ago, I noticed tiny little clusters of buds on both vines...hundreds of them! Yes, the copper treatment worked and the Akebias are not only healthy, they show evidence of being very happy in their new situation. Today, the white one has a few open flowers; the purple one is in a more shady location, and therefore is coming into flower a little more slowly. Akebia can go rogue and become invasive if not monitored, but it is easy to control with pruning. I do hope I get some fruit, but even if I don't, the flowers are enchanting.