Spine Date Seed

Spine Date Seed

　　Also known as wild jujube, sour jujube, big jujube, or thorny jujube. Source: The seed of the plant Ziziphus jujuba var. spinosa (Bunge) Hu ex H.F.Chow.

　　 Spine Date Seed (from Lei Gong's Treatise on the Processing of Medicinal Substances)

　　 [Other names] Jujube Seed (from On the Nature of Medicinals), Spine Date Pit (from Jiangsu Medicinal Plants Record).

　　 [Source] The seed of the plant Ziziphus jujuba var. spinosa.

　　 [Plant morphology] Spine Date (from The Classic of the Materia Medica), also known as: thorn (from The Book of Songs), maple (from Erya), wild jujube (Tao Hongjing), or field jujube (Ren Fang's Records of Strange Things).

　　 A deciduous shrub or small tree, 1–3 meters tall.

　　 Old branches are brown, young branches are green; the branches bear two types of thorns—one needle-like, about 2 cm long, and the other recurved, about 5 mm long.

　　 Leaves are alternate; petioles are very short; stipules are slender and needle-like; leaf blades are elliptic to ovate-lanceolate, 2.5–5 cm long and 1.2–3 cm wide, with a bluntly pointed tip, oblique base, fine serrated edges, and three main veins.

　　 Flowers grow in clusters of 2–3 in leaf axils, small, yellow-green; pedicels are very short; sepals are five, ovate-triangular; petals are small, five in number, alternate with sepals; stamens are five, opposite the petals, slightly longer than the petals; the disk has ten shallow lobes; the ovary is oval, two-celled, embedded in the disk, with a short style and two-lobed stigma.

　　 The drupe is nearly spherical, 1–1.4 cm in diameter, with a blunt tip, turning dark red when ripe, and having a sour taste.

　　 Flowering period is April to May.

　　 Fruiting period is September to October.

　　 Grows on sunny slopes or dry, infertile soils, often forming thickets.

　　 Distributed in Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Anhui, Jiangsu, and other regions.