Passiflora incarnata
Easily enhance your landscape, pollinator garden, porch or patio with the stunningly beautiful and edible passionflower vine. A native plant in Montgomery County, Texas, this fast-growing vine attracts butterflies, bees, and other pollinators to your yard. This vine’s native habitat includes roadsides, prairies, plains, meadows, pastures, woodland edges, streams, and riverbanks. Passionflower vines are perennial and will return each spring in our plant hardiness zone 9b climate. Climbing with tendrils, passionflower vines can reach up to 25 feet in length. The beautiful dark green leaves are edible and delicious either raw in a salad or cooked and added to other greens.
The complexly beautiful passionflower blooms create an attention-grabbing area in the home landscape. Its lavender blooms with purple bands are not only showy but also provide a lovely lemon musk scent. Blooms continue from late spring to September or October in our climate.
Passionflower bloom
Source: Missouri Wildflowers Nursery
Passionflower vine is easy to grow in full sun to part shade. The plant tolerates heat and drought, but it does not thrive in wet areas. For this reason, it is considered a water-saving landscape plant, as it requires low-to-medium watering. In the home landscape, this vine is highly adaptable. It can be used as an ornamental focal point on a trellis or to create a stunning arbor or fast-growing screen. In fact, the passionflower vine will grow several inches each day! A one-inch layer of compost added in the spring is all the fertilizer this native plant needs. If chemical fertilizers are applied, the plant will produce beautiful dark green leaves but very few flowers, so compost is best for vibrant blooms!
Passionflower vine with an overlay picture of a butterfly on a passionflower bloom in the top right corner
Source: Florida Native Plants Nursery and Landscaping
Passionflower fruit develops two to three months after the blooms open. The edible fruit is a large, sweet smelling green berry that is called a “maypop” due to the loud “pop!” heard when someone steps on the fallen fruit. The berry contains numerous flattened, dark-colored seeds covered with an edible pulp. When ripe, these chicken-egg-sized fruits turn a light yellowish-green and appear slightly wrinkled. Fruit that appears to be completely yellow and is also noticeably withered is over-ripe and past its prime to be eaten.
Passion fruit ripeness demonstration. Left to right: over ripe, very ripe, ripe.
Source: AlboPepper
The ripe pulp may also be cooked to make a delicious jam. Use the jam as a breakfast treat served with toast or try it with ice cream as a dessert. It also creates a delicious glaze for grilled and roasted pork or chicken.
Maypop jam in a small mason jar
Source: Unruly gardening
Passionflower offers significant value to wildlife. Birds eat the fruit, and the flowers offer nectar for butterflies, bees, and other pollinators. Most notably, passionflower is the only host plant for the Gulf fritillary butterfly. Just as the monarch butterfly requires milkweed, the Gulf fritillary cannot survive without available passionflower vines for the caterpillars to eat after hatching.
Gulf Fritillary Butterfly on Passionflower
Source: Tallahassee Nurseries
Gulf fritillary eggs on passionflower tendrils
Source: Nurture Native Nature
Gulf fritillary caterpillar on a leaf
Source: Birds and Blooms
Attract another species of spectacular butterfly by planting passionflower vine in your landscape. The zebra longwing butterfly also uses passionflower vine as its host plant. While the zebra longwing is less prevalent in our area than the Gulf fritillary, having its presence in the home landscape is an exciting possibility and a wonderful enhancement to a pollinator garden.
Zebra longwing butterfly on a passionflower vine
Source: The Florida Times-Union
Zebra longwing caterpillar on a vine
Source: Florida Wildflower Foundation
Sources for passionflower vines can be found through online research and by visiting local nurseries specializing in native plants. Check the schedules of the Texas Native Plant Society chapters, Master Gardeners, arboretums, nature centers and other local non-profit organizations which focus on nature and the environment to find a local plant sale with this native plant. Start your native garden today with passionflower vine – our pollinators will thank you!
For more information, contact the Environmental Services Department at enviro@thewoodlandstownship-tx.gov or 281-210-3800.