Yesterday I stopped by the Metropolitan Market on the way home from work. It’s a good store — sort of like Whole Foods, but less crowded, even in the daytime. Good produce and nice people.
Outside the door they have a selection of plants and cut flowers, which I usually just walk by. This time I stopped to look at one of the potted plants, to see if it was a jasmine plant like what we got last summer. It was a weird clematis with little tiny flowers. But next to it was a 2-foot-tall Passion Flower plant! With a BLOOM and a bunch of buds! I’ve been watching out for one of these for years, oh, the last five years at least. Not necessarily at nurseries — don’t get to many of those — but just anywhere I see plants for sale.
The last time I saw one was in a different grocery store. It had been trained around a small heart-shaped trellis thing, and it was so tightly twisted around it, I had to bring it home and untangle it. That took hours. Afterwards I had a happy houseplant, at least for a few years. Perhaps it was a little too happy while it lived, since it never did put on a bloom. Apparently the passiflora that is all content will not bloom so well. That’s one of the things I learned in reading about them today. Another thing learned today: the tightly-wound plant is not uncommon, and doesn’t necessarily need rescuing. Still I’m glad to have freed that plant from its heart-shaped prison.
This time I believe I will plant it in the ground, if I can find a spot that is dry and sunny enough. Or maybe it will go in a pot on the deck. It’s sure sunny there.
The fruits are called maypops. I hope we get some maypops!
Now if only I could figure a way to grow some dragonfruit. Yum yum.
