Passion Flower

The first time I saw a passion flower up close I genuinely couldn't believe it was real. That intricate corona of purple and white filaments radiating from the centre, the five stamens, the three-armed pistil, the ten tepals arranged around the outside — it looks like something a jeweller designed after a particularly vivid dream. It's the most structurally complex flower you'll find growing on a British wall.

Passiflora caerulea is the hardy one, the species that survives British winters if you give it a warm, sheltered wall. Once established, it's vigorous — enthusiastically so — covering a fence or trellis with dark, glossy, hand-shaped leaves and producing those extraordinary flowers from July to October. Each bloom lasts only a day or two, but the plant produces so many in succession that there's always something open.

The flowers are about four inches across and they stop people. I've had delivery drivers pause on the doorstep to ask what it is. The white outer petals form a flat platform, and the corona of filaments — banded blue, white, and purple — creates a frilled halo that catches the light. In the centre, the reproductive parts are arranged with a precision that borders on architectural. It's wildly, improbably beautiful.

In autumn, if the summer was warm enough, you get egg-shaped orange fruits that are technically edible but not really worth eating — tough and seedy, nothing like the commercial passion fruit. I leave them on the vine for their colour. The whole plant, flower and fruit and leaf, has a tropical exuberance that feels like it shouldn't work in an English garden. But it does. Brilliantly.