- Plants
- ›Vascular Plants
- ›flowering plants
- ›Dicots
- ›Gentians, Dogbanes, Madders, and Allies
- ›madder family
- ›Rubioideae
- ›Paederieae
- ›Paederia
skunk vine
Paederia foetida
Paederia foetida is a species of plant, with common names that are variations of skunkvine, stinkvine, pilau maile (Hawaiian) or Chinese fever vine. It is native to temperate, and tropical Asia; and has become naturalized in the Mascarenes, Melanesia, Polynesia, and the Hawaiian Islands, also found in North America by recent studies.
Paederia foetida is known for the strong, sulphurous odour exuded when its leaves or stems are crushed or bruised. This is because the oil responsible for the smell, and found primarily within the leaves, contains sulphur compounds, including largely dimethyl disulphide.
From the article Paederia foetida on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section
Range & habitat
P. foetida is native to Bangladesh and southern Bhutan; Cambodia; Taiwan and China (in Hong Kong and Macau, and the provinces of Anhui, Fujian, Gansu, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Shaanxi, Shandong, Shanxi, Sichuan, Xizang, Yunnan, Zhejiang); India (in Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha, Sikkim, Telangana, in the northern part of West Bengal, and the Andaman and Nicobar islands); Indonesia; Japan (in Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku prefectures, as well as in the Ryukyu Islands); Laos; Malaysia; Myanmar; Nepal; the Philippines; Singapore; South Korea; Thailand; and Vietnam.
Wikipedia: “Distribution”
At the table
It is sometimes planted as an ornamental, and has virtue in folk medicine. It is also used as a culinary spice in some traditional cooking in North Eastern and Eastern India. In Hainanese cuisine, the leaves are ground into flour and mixed with rice to form noodles used in a sweet soup.
Wikipedia: “Uses”
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
—
geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the old herbals & bestiaries
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Paederia foetida in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 126581.