Need help w/ID

18 years ago

Sorry, I don't have any pics yet...

I'm on the GA/SC line, zone 8. I discovered a small patch of some kind of passionflower growing wild on property adjoining a plant nursery and a river that's still partially native (but the area has been heavily disturbed and is rapidly being overtaken by invasive exotics). I *think* it's P. lutea, but I'm not entirely sure. The reason I'm questioning it is because the leaves of this plant are wider and the lobes are a bit deeper and wider than the pics of P. lutea I've found online and in John Vanderplank's book, and even more noticable than that, the leaves are a deep bluish-green with large silver spots on nearly every leaf. Every pic I've seen of P. lutea shows solid green leaves w/only slightly lobed leaves. The flowers of this plant are rather inconspicuous and yellowish. I didn't look at those much, so I don't have details on them. No fruit yet. It's only about 6 feet long at this point and it's been growing for at least 3 months now.

My question is, do you all think this could be a variant of P. lutea, or is it more likely something else? I *very* strongly doubt it's something that escaped from the plant nursery, because for the past several years the only passionflowers they've had are P. vitifolia and P. 'Incense.' Plus, I doubt they would have grown this particular plant anyway, since there's nothing really showy about it, other than the leaves being mildly showy.

Any ideas? I'll try to get pictures soon.

Comments (4)

sgeorgia
18 years ago
Anxious to see the picture.
TigerLadyTX
18 years ago
It certainly sounds like lutea. I assume it has the "duck foot" leaf and there are variants which have silver on the leaves. Silver Sabre, is one that I am familiar with. The leaves have a few silvery splotches on them - sort of variagated. I had one, but the cates killed it last season.

Very possibly someone around the area is/was growing the plant and a bird ate some of the fruit and pooped it out over where you find the vine now growing.

Many plants are spread in that manner.

Regards,
~Tiger
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wilmington_islander
18 years ago
My own lutea has a silvery blue leaf color...probaly just natural variants within the same plant species.
garden4wildlife
Original Author
18 years ago
Sorry it took me so long to reply. The plant is indeed P. lutea as near as I can tell. There are apparently several plants growing in an area and they all come up with the silvery color at first, then as they get older all the new leaves they put out are more green. I still haven't seen any fruit set yet, though.

Now a question...The owner of the property said I could take as many of them as I want to dig up. He occasionally goes through the area with a weed whacker and RoundUp, so I figure I might as well take them since they might get killed any day, and they're not exactly in a natural area or wildlife friendly area anyway. I've tried to move 6 of the approximately 30 small vines that I found coming up (there are also huge ones, but I haven't tried to move those since I figured they'd be a lot more difficult), but most of the small ones are proving to have very long, thin, and easily breakable runners with few roots just below the soil surface. I've tried to follow the runners as far as I can, but the soil is difficult to dig and most of the runners end up going under black cloth that's buried around the area or under huge, decades old camellia bushes (in other words, I can't follow the runners past those points). I did find a couple of seedlings, and I managed to successfully move one of those. It's in a pot and it's not happy, but it's alive. One of the pieces of runner that I dug up seems to be trying to send out a shoot and a few meager roots, too, but all the other pieces died, and so did the other seedling I moved. Does anybody have ideas about how I can improve my transplanting success with these vines? I'd like to get some more of them if I can figure out a way to get better transplanting success.