Korea Flora: Deciduous vine. Length up to 10m. Grows attached to stone walls, rocks, or tree trunks. Winter buds and branchlets conical with sharp tips; bud scales number 3-5 and 1-2mm long. Tendrils grow opposite to leaves, branching with round adhesive roots at the tips that strongly adhere and branch extensively. Leaf scars are circular.  Leaves alternate, broadly ovate, acuminate at apex, cordate at base, 4-10cm × 10-20cm in size, with 3 lobes at the tip and glabrous on the upper surface. Lower surface fine hairs along the veins. Margins irregular teeth. Young leaves on short petioles are compound with 3 leaflets. Petioles longer than the leaves. Leaves turn red in autumn. Petiole length  (2)6-8(10)cm.  Flowers bisexual, in cymes growing from leaf axils or at the ends of short branches, with many florets. Flowers yellowish-green, with a truncate calyx, 5 petals and 5 stamens, and 1 pistil. Fruits and seeds covered with a white powder, 6-8mm in diameter, and black in color.

Flowering: Late May

Fruiting: Late August to mid-October

Distribution: Central to southern China, Taiwan, Japan from Hokkaido to Kyushu; Korea except for the Baekdudaegan mountain range.

Japan Flora: Woody vine, glabrous except on nerves of leaves, especially beneath and on upper part of petioles; suckers of tendrils orbicular; leaves polymorphic, usually thick and lustrous, those on the short spurs 3-lobed, cordate at base, with rounded outer edges, the lobes deltoid and acuminate, 5-12 cm. long and as wide, with loose, obtuse and mucronate coarse teeth, leaves on the long shoots smaller and thinner, broadly ovate, sometimes tri foliolate; inflores­cence short-pedunculate, usually on a short spur, 3-6 cm. long; fruit purplish black, globose, 5-7 mm. across; seeds 1-3, obo­vate-rounded, 4-5 mm. long. June-July. Thickets and woods in hills and mountains.

Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu; common and widely planted in hedges and for covering walls, with several cultivars grown in gardens.  Korea and China.