Some Interesting Facts about PASSIONFLOWER

Passionflower is ecologically intriguing, drop-dead gorgeous, and an incredibly useful herbal medicine and wild edible. Passionflower is very easy to grow, in fact in can be quite rambunctious if consumption does not outpace its exuberance. It often thrives for several years sending up new shoots far from the parent vine with its copious runners, and then the whole colony will up and die. 

The name describes the passion of Christ and his disciples, although in addition, it does excite passion in laboratory mice, who have demonstrated increased mounting of non-estrus females.

Passionflower is also called maypop, the origin of the name is often attributed to children’s proclivity for jumping on the hollow fruits for the simple joy of hearing them “pop”.

Scientific name:

Passiflora incarnata – official species. Native vine to the southeastern US, growing west to eastern Texas and Oklahoma, and north to southern Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Passionflower grows south throughout all of Florida.

The Cherokee used the roots as a poultice to draw out inflammation in thorn wounds; tea of the root in the ear for earache; and tea of the root to wean infants. The Houma people infused the roots as a blood tonic.

Passiflora was introduced into medicine in 1839 or 1840 by Dr. L. Phares, of Mississippi, who, in the New Orleans Medical Journal, records some trials of the drug made by Dr. W. B. Lindsay, of Bayou Gros Tete, La. The use of the remedy has been revived within recent years, Prof. I. J. M. Goss, M. D., of Georgia, having introduced it into Eclectic practice. Prof. Goss, who introduced it to the Eclectic profession, employed the root and its preparations. We know of physicians who prefer the tincture of the leaves, and others still, who desire the root with a few inches of the stem attached.

According to Mills and Bone, passionflower is in the following category of herbs:

Drugs that have been taken by only a limited number of pregnancy women and women of childbearing age, without an increase in the frequency of malformation of other direct or indirect harmful effects on the human fetus having been observed. Studies in animals have not shown evidence of an increased occurrence of fetal damage.