Passion Flowers (Passiflora)

I've talked about our brick patio in the back, and shown how HomoDommi managed to mask the neighbor's ugly decrepit garage with a frame of wood and several climbing plants -- clematis, honeysuckle, mandevilla and passion flower.

The passion flower won, clearly, this year, covering the north lattice and stretching out over the fence along side. The other plants are all still alive and growing, just without the abundance of the passion flower. Over winter, the greenery will die away (not what we intended) and the race will be on again next summer.

I am not familiar with passion flowers -- either they don't survive in the Midwest, or I hadn't noticed them in all the years I was there. Indeed, the flowers (at least, of our genus) are mild and retiring as a whole, against the background of thick dark green trifoliate leaves and curlicue graspers. According to wikipedia, early Spanish Christian missionaries "discovered" the flower (Europe is about the only place on earth where they don't grow natively) and named it for the passion of the Christ: the radial filaments represent his crown of thorns, and the sepals represent the ten apostles, the three stigmata are symbols for the three nails, and the five anthers symbolize Christ's five wounds. These missionaries were true Christ-geeks, for I can't imagine seeing such a horrific, bloody and physical analogy in this delicate and subtly-scented flower.

Apparently in Israel and Japan it is known as variants on clock-flower -- a more literal interpretation given the petals like clock "spokes" and the blossom's life cycle of one day. But that name doesn't capture the unearthliness of the flower -- at least the missionaries sensed something less mundane about the blossoms. To me it looks like something from another planet (just as cleome looks wonderfully alien, too).

Writing this entry, I discovered I have taken over 66 photos of the vine, trying to capture its true essence. I still haven't quite captured it. (These photos were all taken in mid-September. It's done flowering now, except for some late stragglers, blooming to spite the cold and rain of October.)