Medicinal Herbs

Tinospora Extract

Tinospora sinensis

Tinospora (Tinospora sinensis) is a climbing vine seven or eight metres long, its long branches trailing, downy at first and smooth with age. The heart-shaped leaves are ten to twelve centimetres long and eight to ten wide, with five spreading veins, hairy enough beneath to look pale. Whitish flowers hang in downy sprays from the leaf axils, followed in the north in March and April by red fruit with sticky pulp. It grows wild across Vietnam, mountains and lowlands alike, and fast: a single cutting can put on twenty kilograms of stem and leaf in two years. The stem is cut into twenty-to-thirty-centimetre lengths and dried.