Passion flowers at Kew

Meet some weird and wonderful passion flowers from the Kew hot houses.

As F&F readers might have noticed, I’ve grown rather, er, passionate about passion flowers in the past year. I have five different species growing in my garden at present, but some I’ll never really be able to grow because I don’t have a hot house. So visiting Kew Gardens really is indulging that passion.

Some of the passion flowers growing there aren’t that different to the ones I’ve grown myself, like this Passiflora x violacea:

And then some that are a little stranger, like Passiflora garckei:

Let’s get a little closer to those bustling strands on that beautiful halo:

Well, that is a pretty little thing, isn’t it? But it still looks rather like the passion flowers we all grow in our gardens. Let’s get a little less normal with this Passiflora edmundoi:

The halo is barely there, just a very neat, thick crown at the centre under the stigma and the petals look blown back as if by the wind. It is a delicate, papery flower.

Less passion flower-esque still is this Passiflora aurantia:

But my favourite passion flower that I discovered at Kew was this one, that I’ll call a sleeping beauty passion flower from now on because such a pretty, delicate flower is locked up by thorns:

This is Passiflora foetida, so named because the crushed foliage has a rather distinctive smell.

The flowers are encased in those funny spiky-looking jumbles of bracts, which also trap insects and digests them, apparently only as a protective measure.