Mountain pepper and litsea cubeba are the same thing. Mountain pepper is also known as litsea cubeba, Bicheng eggplant and pheasant. Mountain pepper and litsea cubeba are the same plant, but they are called differently in different places. Many people mistake them for two plants. In fact, there is no obvious difference between the two. These two names refer to the special plant Zanthoxylum bungeanum, whose leaves are flexible and can play different tunes. Fruits, leaves and roots can be used as medicine, and their effects are excellent.

Litsea cubeba and Zanthoxylum bungeanum belong to different regions. Taking different names for the fruits of the same plant is just like a person having a big name and a small name. They are all ripe fruits of Litsea cubeba, a plant of Piperaceae, and contain a lot of vegetable oil. Zanthoxylum bungeanum is a kind of wild deciduous shrub, and it is also a plant with excellent drug effect. Zanthoxylum bungeanum is mainly distributed in mountainous and hilly areas of China, Shandong, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Henan and other places. The shrubs in these areas are its main growing areas and can be harvested all year round.

Morphological characteristics of Zanthoxylum bungeanum

Deciduous shrubs or small trees, up to 8 meters high, with smooth bark, gray or grayish white. Winter buds (mixed buds) have long horns, about 1.5 cm long and 4 mm in diameter. The exposed part of bud scales is red, and the young branches are white and yellow. At first, they have brown hairs, and then they fall off into hairless ones. Leaves alternate, broadly ovoid, ovoid, obovate to narrowly obovate, 4-9 cm long, 2-4 cm wide, dark green at the top and light green at the bottom, covered with white hairs, papery, pinnate veins, with 5-6 lateral veins on both sides, which do not fall off after withered leaves, and fall off when new leaves come out the next year.

Umbrella axillary, peduncle short or inconspicuous, generally less than 3 mm long. The involucral bracts born in mixed buds are green membranous, and each involucral bract has 3-8 flowers. The perianth of the male flower is yellow, oval, about 2.2 mm long, the inner and outer whorls are almost equal, the outer back is hairy, the stamens are 9, nearly equal, and the filaments are hairless. At the base of the third round, there are two broad kidney-shaped glands with horny processes, and the base of the stalk is connected with the base of the filament as a whole. Sometimes the filaments of the second round also have smaller glands and are densely white pilose.

The above contents refer to Baidu Encyclopedia-Mountain Pepper.