More passion than you can shake a stick at

You're not going to believe this. I hardly believe it myself. Last summer, I gave a fellow in San Antonio a couple of root cuttings from my Incense. He'd been into cactus for a long time, and had just stumbled across the whole world of passiflora and contacted me via email after seeing some posts I'd made online about the plants. I didn't think anything more of it--I pretty much give away passiflora root cuttings to anyone who asks, right?

He emailed me last week. Said he'd bought some additional plants and seeds since last summer, they'd flourished, and now had more than he could easily deal with. Would I like some? All I had to do was drive to his house and pick them up.

I now have TWENTY-SIX year-old (more or less) plants evenly divided amongst alata, edulis and vitifolia x coccinea. Each of these is AT LEAST six feet long. Some are longer. They were all pretty much rootbound in little 3.5" pots. I've managed to transplant about half into gallon pots, but man, it's a task. I'm also going to attempt to plant a couple of the alatas in sheltered spots in my yard. Passiflora authority John Vanderplank writes that they're hardy down to freezing, but he seems to be a bit conservative with his estimates (in my experience). We'll see.

This guy also had several other plants growing huge in the ground. I got cuttings of coccinea, vitifolia, Pura Vida and Crimson Tears-- once all was said and done, I sliced the collected vines up into a total of 30 potted cuttings. Now it's a case of sitting back and waiting with my fingers crossed for these disembodied stems to put out roots.

He also gave me a packet of Pride of Barbados seeds (which I was looking for, believe it or not) and p. antioquensis seeds. He told me he's been in contact with a grower in San Diego that's had a great deal of success growing antioquensis in the ground. Antioquensis is a rare and sought-after tasconia-type passi that does poorly whenever temperatures climb above 80 degrees. Supposedly, the roots are what can't handle the heat, so this guy has been grafting them onto caerulea rootstock. I kind of goggled at this bit of information. Apparently there's a back issue of the Passiflora Society newsletter that goes into a good bit of detail about this. Very interesting. I'm probably going to have to join that groups sooner or later.

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