The easy-care passion flowers are perfect for growing among plant breeders and perhaps creating your own species. But even without breeding ambitions, you can grow Passiflora yourself from seeds or cuttings.
How can you grow passion flowers yourself?
There are two methods of growing passion flowers yourself: seeds or cuttings. Seed propagation requires freshness, warmth, brightness, moisture and patience. Propagation from cuttings is easier, requires young mature shoots and the same conditions as seed propagation. Cuttings bloom faster than seedlings.
Growing Passiflora from seeds
With a little luck, your passion flower will produce fruits after flowering, from which you can eventually get seeds if the fruit ripens. Before fruit formation, however, fertilization is necessary first, which usually has to be done by hand. To do this, use a brush to transfer the pollen from one flower to another, but be careful: some Passiflora species are self-fertile, i.e. H. No second plant is necessary for pollination. Other species, on the other hand, only fruit if pollinated by a foreign passiflora. In this case it must not be a clone of the first, as it is genetically the same and is therefore not recognized as a foreign plant. Genetic clones are obtained via cutting propagation.
Growing from seeds requires warmth and patience
Of course, you don't need to get the seeds from fruit yourself, you can simply buy seed packets. Please note, however, that the germination ability of these seeds decreases over time and dried seeds also take significantly longer to germinate. A lot of patience is required for passion flowers anyway, as it can take months for the seedling to emerge from the growing substrate. Proceed as follows when growing seeds:
- Clean fresh seeds carefully from the pulp.
- Soak dried seeds in lukewarm water for 24 hours before sowing.
- Fill coconut substrate (“cocohum”) or potting soil into small pots.
- Press seeds loosely – Passiflora is a light germinator.
- Moisten seeds and soil.
- Keep as warm as possible, temperatures between 20 and 25 °C are optimal.
- Place the cultivation pot in an indoor greenhouse (€29.00 on Amazon) on or near a heater.
- Location should be as bright as possible.
- Always keep the substrate moist.
- Be patient.
Propagation from cuttings is particularly easy
However, you don't need to be quite as patient as when growing from seeds when propagating them from cuttings - passion flowers are usually very easy to grow from cuttings. Choose young but already mature shoots, as experience has shown that these root better than very young branches. A rooting hormone helps with rooting, otherwise the same applies as with seeds: lots of warmth, brightness, moisture and patience.
Tips & Tricks
If you don't want to grow them yourself, but just have several passion flowers, propagation from cuttings is the better choice. Passionflowers grown from cuttings bloom faster than seedlings, which usually only bloom in the second year.
