Ficus sinuata aka String Of Frogs

Ficus sinuata Thunb. is a tropical Asian fig in the family Moraceae, originally described by Carl Peter Thunberg in 1786. According to Plants of the World Online, the species is best classified as a climbing shrub of the wet tropics rather than a free-standing tree. Useful Tropical Plants describes it as a sprawling shrub or small tree with drooping branches that can reach about six metres in height, frequently epiphytic in habit, attaching itself to host trees with a short stem and clasping aerial roots. It is therefore typical of the vine-like, hemiepiphytic figs of the Asian rainforest understorey.

The native range stretches across tropical Asia from northeast India (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura) and Bangladesh through Myanmar, peninsular Thailand and Vietnam, into peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, Sumatra, Borneo (including the Natuna Islands), Java, and the Lesser Sunda Islands as far east as Bali, with additional records from the Nicobar Islands and the East Himalaya. POWO summarises this as "Assam to W. Malesia". The plant grows in moist lowland and submontane forest, chiefly in the undergrowth, at elevations up to roughly 1,500–1,800 metres.

The fruit is a small fig (syconium) borne in the leaf axils, subglobose and about one centimetre across, ripening orange-red and typically clustered two to six together. According to Useful Tropical Plants the fruits are edible raw and described as "small, but very tasty"; no medicinal or other commercial uses are recorded for the species. As with all Ficus, pollination depends on a species-specific fig wasp in the family Agaonidae, and the plant relies on synchronous reproductive cycles within local populations to keep its wasp partners alive.

Taxonomically, Ficus sinuata has accumulated a long list of synonyms including Ficus quercifolia Blume, Ficus marginalis Buch.-Ham. ex Miq., Ficus obtusidens Miq., Ficus angulidens Miq., Ficus rostrata Lam., Ficus raridens Miq., Ficus sinuata var. oblonga Corner, and Ficus radicans var. angulosa Miq. The IUCN Red List assesses the species as Least Concern at the global level, and there are no records of weed or invasive status outside its native range. It is not in significant horticultural cultivation as a houseplant.