Flower of June: Passionate about Passionflower

What is the vine with the exotic purple flowers that pops up in the North Florida area in the summer months? It is no other than the stunning plant Passiflora, also called passionflower or maypop. Passiflora incarnata is the most common species in the southeast but you will most likely encounter other examples of this plant, with varieties in the many hundreds.

Passionflower when used in landscape design looks best in natural and informal plantings, as its vines tend to go where they please and are typically deciduous as opposed to evergreen. It is especially valued in butterfly gardens, as it is the food plant of many different types of Florida caterpillars. Passionflower is a fast growing perennial that can grow as high at 12 feet!

The unique purple flowers of passionflower are about three inches in diameter and each blossom only lasts 24 hours.  Our local passionflower vines, considered a wildflower, have hardy roots through very cold weather and their fruits are edible, although so popular with wildlife you will rarely get a chance to see them ripen to the orange color they attain in the late summer and fall before they are eaten.  

Passionflower is the food of a number of butterfly species, including the zebra longwing and Gulf fritillary. Bumblebees are known to become intoxicated from the nectar of passionflower (look closely at the photo at the top), and will stay on the blooms all day long, sometimes falling to the ground in a stupor.

The fruit was a favorite of colonial settlers of the South and Native Americans alike; the Cherokee called it "ocoee" and some people still know it as wild apricot.  To this day eating passionfruit is a favorite of Cajuns: they call the plant liane de grenade, or "pomegranate vine".

Native Americans taught European colonists to utilize leaves of passionflower to make a calming medicinal tea, and it is still used this way in some Central and South American cultures. There are studies currently being done to investigate whether passionflower leaf extract is a better alternative to anxiety medications than the current pharmaceutical treatment.

And finally - why is this lovely flower named for "passion"?  The label refers to the passion of Jesus in Christian history: in the 15th and 16th centuries, Spanish missionaries chose the physical structures of this flower, especially the numbers of its various parts, as symbols of their faith.  You may notice the passionflower sometimes appearing as a decorative element in Christian artworks over the centuries since.

Passionflower will always be found in areas with lots of available sunlight, never in shady areas beneath a forest canopy. Other species you could likely encounter in North and Central Florida include the Passiflora racemosa, a large evergreen vine with long clusters of bright red passionflowers, about five inches each in diameter. Also growing in gardens and forests of Palm Coast, St. Augustine, and Ormond Beach is the blue passionflower, Passiflora caerulea.

🦚Article by Connie Helena, author of The Green Orchid 🦚