White Passionflower

There’s a patch of white passionflower (Passiflora incarnata) in my garden that consistently blooms pure white blossoms. The ‘pops’ also look a little different, with a rounder shape than the usual egg-shaped pods. The other passionflowers around our place all bloom the usual purple. For a while, I thought it was just because they’re in more shade than the other vines that grow in our yard and on our land.

Passiflora incarnata ‘alba’ | White Passionflower

I think this patch of all-white flowers are the sub-species, or variant ‘alba’, or maybe adding the ‘alba’ simply means that this one produces white flowers. I haven’t seen anything in my research to tell for sure. The naming of plants beyond the binomial is confusing to me. Anyway, I’ve transplanted one I dug to a pot to move into a different location to see if it also continues to bloom white. If it does, then I am going to assume this is what it is, and I’ll begin propagating more of them to offer in my catalog for my Wild Ozark nursery. I’ll link to the nursery catalog, but right now there isn’t much to offer. I need to propagate more plants. But there is bare-root ginseng and white mountain mint.

Maypops

We always called them maypops where I grew up in Louisiana. I guess that moniker came from the popping sound the seedpods make when you step on them. But they don’t bloom here so early, let alone make the seedpods so early, so ‘maypop’ doesn’t seem such a fitting name anymore.

Here, the flowers begin to bloom somewhere around July or June, and the pods come on near the end of July.

Medicinal Native Herbs

One of my passions is identifying and using native medicinal plants. Our white passionflowers probably have the same traditional uses as the purple ones.