Singapore Plants Lover: Passion Fruits & Passion Flowers

Just some updated for my old post passion-fruits, it is bearing fruit now.

Passion-fruits are easy to grow in containers as long as with enough sunlight and fertilizer, of course, the container is required to a certain size, at least like a half wine barrel or our Chinese salt egg barrel. Ensure you use a good quality well-drained potting mix formulated specifically for containers.

One of very interesting notes about this plant, my friend planted one for almost 3 years with nicely grown leaves and beautiful flowers, but none of one fruit...Actually there are few type of similar plants, one as named Passiflora alatocaerulea forms no fruit.

Passiflora, known also as the passion flowers or passion vines, is a genus of about 500 species of flowering plants. The two pictures from above and below were taken from my potted plants, just for flowers, stunning beauty.

If you are growing only one passion fruit, select a self-pollinating cultivar, typically the purple fruit producing varieties.

The yellow variety of the passion fruit vine is best suited for our local tropical climate. It is a hardy plant with woody vines, a climber and will need trellising to hold it up. The pollination of this plant is usually facilitated with carpenter bees. You will need to manually pollinate your passion flowers if there is no bees available in your area. And normally need female and male flowers bloom at the same time to do so. These plants are self-sterile, which means that you will need to cross the pollen produced by one plant with the stamen of another plant. That is the reason, some old people say there are male plants and female plants. LOL. By the way according to my study, Yellow passion fruit vines will not accept the pollen of the purple variety. So choose the right type of plant if your space is limited.

Some other passion flora I found which is not in beautiful purple or blue, they are white flowers. Like the two pictures below:

This picture I found from Gardening with Wilson

According Wilson say, This one, Passiflora foetida. a member of the Passion Fruit family, Passifloraceae. Unlike its relatives, the Giant Granadilla and the Common Passion Fruit (Passiflora edulis), Passiflora foetida occurs mainly as a weed. They were growing in wild in most tropical countries, including Singapore in the past, but now it is getting uncommon as Singapore continues to urbanise.

The one below was seen in Beijing, on the roof top of people's house, cant tell its species. Pure white flowers with a circle of purple in the centre, very unique, indeed.