We’re surrounded
When 16th century Spanish explorers first beheld the passionflower, they saw the son of God. The blossom’s lavish mop of filaments became the crown of thorns and the blossom a symbol of the Passion of Christ. Hence the name passionflower and Latinized form Passiflora.
To a California gardener’s eyes, the arching anthers and stigmas suggest a different sort of passion: the wantonness of flowers.
The first passionflowers appear in May, their vines surging through the arms of fruit trees in search of sun. As the first fruit ripens in June, the vines are not only still growing but also still flowering. Every flower has its day. The blossoms open only one by one, and then for only 24 hours, each loaded with nectar to reward the attentions of a passing bee.
After bees fertilize the flowers, fruit forms in blushing succession, then birds arrive to raid the seeds and sow a new generation of vines in the process. And so, in a single season, one vine can become 50.
As we yank the vines from trees, from shrubs, from between the cracks in paths, we should take comfort. We’re not weeding. We’re wrestling with history. More important crops certainly came out of the plundering of the Americas. Tomatoes, peppers, cocoa. But passion vines, above all, filled the first explorers with awe. Now, as then, they sum up the glory of the New World.
The task, gasp, is how to manage that glory. Gardeners in the Carolinas are used to disentangling themselves. They grew up with a native passion vine, the purple-faced P. incarnata, or maypops. Likewise, our Hawaiian counterparts have been overrun by loveliness. There, P. mollissima, or the banana passionfruit, was introduced from South America as a crop, but the plant is now a noxious weed.
Now Los Angeles, too, is being engulfed by a South American import, P. caerulea. It has adapted so well to our arid conditions that it is second only to morning glories for urban cover of unirrigated stretches of chain-link.
The upshot is a modern paradox. As P. caerulea approaches official invasive species status, the cry from horticulturists is that nurseries carry too few of the remaining 500-plus species of passion vines. We have, it seems, too much of too little.
As weeds go, P. caerulea is a stunner. The name, which means sky blue, refers to the intense ring of violet at the center of the flower’s corona filaments. The bloom turns into an equally lovely fruit, great vines dangling with persimmon-colored, fig-shaped little sacs.
The flavor? No plant is perfect. For the sweetness that dessert chefs rave about, Southern Californians are limited by climate to a few fruiting varieties. The best is probably P. edulis, a hardy vine with purple fruit that on a dessert plate can do anything a raspberry can do, except more fragrantly.
Or so says Los Angeles-based passiflorist Jorge Ochoa, who last weekend lectured at the annual meeting of the California Rare Fruit Growers at Cal Poly Pomona on how to overcome climate limitations cultivating tropical vines in a Mediterranean climate. It’s just too hot here for some of the most prized species, such as the Central American species P. ligularis, he explained. The tropical vine’s roots simply cannot absorb the water needed to keep the fast-growing foliage hydrated. Heavy watering only induces root rot.
Rather than write off sensitive tropical varieties, Ochoa would like to see the nursery trade start grafting luscious fruiting vines onto hardier rootstock, such as our chain-link-loving P. caerulea. Propagating fruit whose seeds produced offspring too wimpy to hack it here might solve the invasiveness problem too.
As specialist nurseries expand their lists of purely ornamental species, invasiveness is less of a problem for many alternatives to P. caerulea than the likelihood that the plant will wither and die. Most passion vines are rainforest plants, says Ochoa: fast growing to surge toward light when it breaks through tree canopies, averse to extreme heat or frost, and with waxy petals to withstand frequent showers. When rarities are sold, he often recommends keeping them in pots in shaded areas out of fierce sun.
John M. MacDougal, a biologist with the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis and coauthor of a definitive new book, “Passiflora: Passionflowers of the World,” has identified more than 25 new species from Central America. One of the most important things to respect with the vines, he says, is their creeping genius. They should never be twined through a trellis as if they were a wisteria or jasmine. “They hate that,” he says. Instead, tie them up lightly, then let the plant’s tendrils feel their way toward suitable supports. The motion and sensitivity of these tendrils, he said, astonished Darwin himself.
“They move just fast enough to be visible to a patient observer,” he says.
In 1980, MacDougal introduced the crimson-leaved and violet-flowered P. standleyi into the nursery trade, mainly as a house plant. The leaves, in the shape of a tuning fork, bear a progression of tiny dots. These, he says, are egg-patterned camouflage evolved by the plant to discourage butterflies from laying real eggs that will turn into browsing caterpillars. “It’s amazing,” he says.
Almost every passion vine evolved with a specific breed of butterfly dependent on its leaves. In North America, our tumbling harbinger of summer, the orange Gulf fritillary butterfly, relies on P. incarnata and P. caerulea.
While the leaves are for butterflies, the flowers are for bees. The coronas that Jesuits took as crowns of thorns serve as helipads for our nectar-addled carpenter and bumble bees.
The face of God, indeed.
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A passionflower for every purpose
There’s an art to growing tropical passion vines in a Mediterranean climate. For starters, choose a vigorous -- but not too vigorous -- species. California passiflorist Jorge Ochoa recommends these specimens for local home gardens.
For balconies: A rare yellow variety discovered by John M. MacDougal in Honduras and recently introduced to the U.S., P. citrina has green, bat-shaped leaves and lemon-yellow flowers. Along with P. sanguinolenta, it is small and tolerates shade.
For blooms: Red flowers are show-stoppers. P. vitifolia and P. manicata are star-shaped and lipstick-hued. P. ‘Amethyst’ (a.k.a. ‘Lavender Lady’) has large magenta flowers and is a good foil for bougainvillea. P. ‘Coral Glow’ comes in a neon pink rarely seen outside of Miami. P. ‘Byron Beauty’ is shiny-leafed evergreen with purple flowers, but no fruit, so no runaway seeds.
For fruit: The standard is the self-fertile P. edulis, recognizable by its corona filaments -- a fabulous mop, purple at the roots and white at the ends. The variety ‘Frederick’ is the standard for ease of growing, size, flavor (a mix between guava and pineapple) and a musky, almost vanillin fragrance.
P. actinia is also worth trying. It will have two blooming periods, late winter and early fall, producing bell-shaped white flowers with purple bands on the crown. The flowers have the intense scent of lilacs and produce sweet, medium-size, yellow fruit with a flavor reminiscent of grapes. It needs another plant for cross-pollination (the common blue P. caerula is a good pollinator).
For butterfly gardens: Gulf fritillary butterflies lay eggs on P. caerula. It is perfect for urban chain-link but avoid planting it in neighborhoods near wild spaces so it won’t become invasive.
For scent: ‘New Incense’ and another hybrid, ‘Elizabeth,’ are sweet and musky with vanilla notes.
Plant sources: Kartuz Greenhouses, 1408 Sunset Drive, Vista, or P.O. Box 790, Vista CA 92085; (760) 941-3613; www.kartuz.com.
References: “Passiflora: Passionflowers of the World” by Torsten Ulmer and John M. MacDougal, $39.95 Timber Press, to be published in September.
Passiflora Society International, www.passi flora.org.
