My Passiflora

Today I’m going to talk about my Passiflora. My mother send a pack of passiflora seeds a bit over five years ago. My husband and I planted the seeds and, from all, one picked up and grew and grew. After an year or so, we’ve moved to our new home and we took the passiflora with us. Being very busy with the renovation of the house, the move, work, and other things, we didn’t pay enough attention to it. It looked like it was about to die. We’ve decided to transfer it into the garden regardless and see how it will go from there.

Passiflora or the passion flower is also known as blue passion flower and blue crown. It is an evergreen plant. It did happen to lose a lot of leaves, after we’ve had some strong winds here, but it recovered nicely. It originates from South America. The flowers, as you can see are stunning, intricate, delicate, and beautiful.

This is how the passiflora looked in its first summer at our new home, in 2015. It was small, but full of leaves. It looked like it will do more than survive, that it will thrive.

This is the passiflora last year. It did grow a lot in only two years.

But this is how big it is now. Ignore the burned grass, it needs a bit of time to recover after the hot weather we’ve had.

Despite having this hot weather, the plant survived. The leaves are green and beautiful. She has a lot of flowers. Not all of the flowers are in bloom at the same time, as with the other climbing plants we have in the garden. I like that, because there seem to be always at least three or four flowers in bloom every day. It has been like that for the last month, maybe a bit more.

According to RHS (details on www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/12356/Passiflora-caerulea/Details), passiflora can grow up to 12m in height and have a spread of up to 4m. We don’t want to it grow in height, so we’ve tied it to the fence, waited for it to grow a bit more, and tied it again. Now it looks like it will cover all the back fence. I’m loving it. Because we have this bush, small birds are feeling more comfortable coming at the bird feeder. Besides the pigeons, magpies, and blackbirds, we have smaller birds having a snack. It’s lovely to see them. The height of the fence is what keeps them safe. Also, Festus, our dog keeps the cats out of the garden too. One of them tried to catch birds and soon discovered that she could be the one chased.
The pigeons and the black birds are comfortable with Festus in the garden. They learned that he is not chasing them, so he is not a threat. You can see Festus and a pigeon having his meal in the picture from 2017.

The downside of having a passiflora in the garden is that this plant is toxic for human and pets if ingested. So, is not recommended for families with small children, unless they are properly supervised. For us, with no children, and a well behaved dog, there is no risk of ingestion.

The most exciting thing happened a couple of weeks ago. My husband discovered two new passiflora plants near the big one. We will dig those up and transfer them to a big planter, and we’ll place that on the drive way. I will try to make it grow over the porch. It will look amazing. I’m going to take pictures of that, and make an update when it started to grow. Who knows, maybe it will get bigger as soon as next year.