The history of our passion flower

The passion flower is not a native of the UK and until recently they haven't done too well in our climate, as botanist Trevor Dines explained in the third episode of Wild Things earlier this year.

So imagine our surprise when one popped out of nowhere and started growing right under our living room window! I didn't know what it was when all we could see were leaves, so we allowed it to grow hoping that it would flower - which would then help us to identify it and see if it's a plant we wanted to keep.

Well it obliged and gave us a display of a couple of flowers. From the flowers, we judged it to be the common passion flower (Passiflora caerulea).

A lovely floral display from our passion flower this year.

We did wonder how it came to be in our garden in the first place and suspected that perhaps one of the previous owners had planted it. It's the ideal location with the front of the house being the southern-most facing.

Then Lucy happened upon an old photograph from an estate agent website. So we then thought that the people we bought the house from had hacked the plant down as there was no sign of it when we viewed the house or in the estate agent listing when we bought it. And that it was planted by the owners previous to them. As you can see in the photograph it used to be well established.

Passion flower far right.

Our suspicions we proved correct when we were chatting to a lovely lady that walks her dog past our house. She told us that the passion flower was very vigorous and used to grow all the way down the grass!

Being happy to keep it, but not to let it get out of control, I fastened some wire to the front of the house earlier this year. This allowed the plant to grow up to the window and be a nice cover for the wall under the window. We've then kept pruning it back when it gets a bit too much! This way it will also be easy to cut out old stems and have the new stems held in place by the wire as they grow.

Either about to open or about to close!

The passion flower has been superb this year and the flowers even went to fruit, which was fun to watch. The fruit begins green, but over time, turns to orange. I think that this makes it a plant of real interest, first the flowers and then the fruit, all through summer.

As Trevor Dines mentioned that it was edible, I took one of the fruits inside. It's a really interesting fruit to look at when it's opened, revealing lots of seeds surrounded by a sticky liquid! I did try some raw, but as is mentioned all over the Internet - it's not a nice flavour and not an experiment I'll try again. Apparently the flower can be used to make a tea that alleviates anxiety.

The ripe fruit cut in half.

As our house is a 1970s build, there is no real history and it's the same as every other house on the street. So it was quite nice finding out something of interest in the history of the house - especially because it's plant related.

Thanks for reading.