Redball snake gourd
Trichosanthes tricuspidata
- Names in the book
- The book records no Philippine name for this plant.
- Names from other sources
- None found. PROSEA gives names from neighbouring countries but none from the Philippines.
- Used for
- Cough and asthmaConstipation
- Colours
- flowerwhitefruitred
- Native range
- South and Southeast Asia
- In the Philippines, per the book
- Luzon.
- Family
- Cucurbitaceae, filed in the book under Cucurbitaceæ
- Printed as
- Trichosanthes palmata, Roxb. (T. tricuspis, Mig.; T. lucioniana, Bares.)
- Sources
- Page 127 on Project Gutenberg · Wikipedia
The plant today
Trichosanthes tricuspidata is a species of flowering plant in the family Cucurbitaceae. It is a climbing plant native to the Andaman Islands, Borneo, Cambodia, Indonesia, Java, Laos, the Lesser Sunda Islands, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Nicobar Islands, Sulawesi, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Excerpt from “Trichosanthes tricuspidata” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Recorded in the Philippines
GBIF holds 10 records of this plant from the Philippines. The ones with map coordinates fall in 1 province: Sorsogon (1).
Counts from GBIF occurrence records, October 2026. They include planted trees and garden plants, and a province with no records may only lack collectors.
What the 1901 book says
A historical record, quoted as printed. Doses and remedies here are not medical advice.
Uses
Roxburgh states that the fruit is toxic and sometimes used to kill crows. Dymock states that the leaf is smoked in Bombay as a remedy for asthma.
The extremely bitter taste of the fruit and rind induced Sir W. O’Shaughnessy to examine it for tonic and purgative properties; doses as high as 0.20 gram 3 times a day failed to exert a purgative effect. The root is used in veterinary medicine particularly for pneumonia. Mixed with equal parts of colocynth it is applied to carbuncles. In combination with equal parts of Terminalia chebula and ginger it is made into a sweetened infusion for internal use in gonorrhœa.
Botanical description
A climber with broad, heart-shaped, serrate, 7-lobulate leaves. Flowers monœcious; staminate white and racemose; pistillate solitary, growing at the base of the staminate racemes. Staminate receptacle tubular, calyx inserted on the border of the receptacle, 5 sepals. Corolla, 5 petals. Stamens 5, of which 4 are in pairs. Pistillate: the receptacle dilates in its lower part in form of a globose vase and encloses the unilocular pluriovulate ovary. Fruit ovoid or pyriform, scarlet when fresh, orange-yellow when dry. Seeds of irregular form, somewhat triangular. Kernel oily.
Recent research
The most cited papers since 2018 that name this plant in the title, pulled from Europe PMC in October 2026. Titles are the authors' own and the findings have not been reviewed here.
All 2 results on Europe PMC