Is this an incarnata?

15 years ago

I bought this vine at Home Depot last year, labelled as "purple passion flower vine".

I've been working on the assumption that it's a Maypop, but I read in another message that Maypop smell like peanut butter. My flowers smell wonderfully fragrant and perfumy :-)

I've noticed, for the very first time (woo-hoo!) fruits. They can't be more than a week old (see what happens when you garden without your contacts in? you miss stuff!).
{{gwi:1131864}}From Garden

They are not at all what I expected. I've eaten many passion fruit ("granadilla" in Costa Rica) and the skin on these baby fruits is not smooth at all like the ripe ones I've eaten, it's fuzzy-ish, almost like velveteen. These also feel very heavy for their size, nothing like the (surprisingly, at first) lightness of the ripe fruit.

Any thoughts?

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Comments (4)

eristal
15 years ago
Hello,

It's not a P. incarnata. The flower, foliage and fruit are all typical of a hybrid between P. incarnata and P. cincinnata. The most common is P. 'Incense'. The fruit is edible, though not what I would call delicious. Not bad, but not great. Make a margarita with it maybe...

The odd thing is that generally, P. 'Incense' does not set fruit on its own. In all cases I know of it requires another Passiflora to pollinate it... specifically P. incarnata seems to be the most likely to create fruit. I had my P. 'Incense' plant for a decade before it set fruit the first year I finally had blooms on a P. incarnata! Living in Orlando, it is very likely you have bees as vectors from surrounding yards, and many people grow P. incarnata there, willingly and unwillingly.

I hope that helps,

Eric
alys_esmond USDA 5b Toronto
Original Author
15 years ago
Thanks, Eric.

My neighbour has a huge, huge! clump of some kind of purple passiflora (I haven't looked too closely and will check it out tomorrow) and there's some sort of red passiflora growing on my bottom fence:
From Garden
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eristal
15 years ago
The red one is P. vitifolia. A lovely plant, but almost certainly not the pollinator of your P. 'Incense'. If your neighbor has something you want, many Passiflora are fairly easy to root!
Ament
15 years ago
The red is gorgeous! :) Thank you for sharing.

~Tina Marie