Great Design Plant: Passiflora Incarnata

Passiflora incarnata (also known as maypop, wild passion vine and purple passion flower), is a wonderful vine to add to your landscape for its summertime beauty and its habitat values for butterflies and other pollinators. The flowers are beautiful and amazingly intricate. The fruit is edible.

The flowers add a bright spot to the landscape in the summer after the spring flowers are finished and before the fall bloomers get started. There are a number of different species — both native and exotic. Six, including Passiflora incarnata, are native to Florida.

Botanical name: Passiflora incarnata
Common names: Maypop, wild passion vine, purple passionflower
Origin: Native to the southeastern U.S., including eastern Texas, southern Illinois, southern Pennsylvania and nearly all of Florida
Where it will grow: Hardy to -15 degrees Fahrenheit (USDA zones 7a to 10b; find your zone)
Typical plant communities: Open hammocks, fencerows, roadsides and disturbed sites
Water requirement: Medium to dry, well-drained soil; sand to loam
Light requirement: Full sun or partial shade
Mature size: Vines can grow to 20 feet or more in a season; the plant dies back to the ground each winter in most of its range, but in frost-free zones it grows continuously
Benefits and tolerances: Does well in disturbed sites but not waterlogged soils
Seasonal interest: Amazingly intricate summertime flowers that attract butterflies and other pollinators; some butterflies also come because this is their larval host plant; the fruit is edible
When to plant: Plant seeds in late fall, but plants or seedlings do best when planted in the early spring so they have a chance to fully develop before the first frost


Distinguishing traits. The strikingly complex flower is unmistakable. It’s 3 inches across with numerous lavender to white petal-like tepals (a tepal is a unit of the showy part of a flower, the perianth, where the petals and the sepals look the same) that look like they’ve been crimped. The lobed leaves with sharp points help in identifying it before it blooms.

Early Spanish explorers named it passionflower, or passionvine, because they thought the floral parts represented aspects of the Christian crucifixion story, or The Passion.

How to use it. This plant is a must-have for your butterfly garden. Passiflora incarnata can crawl on the ground, but it is best displayed on a trellis or fence. Place it at the rear of the garden to serve as a backdrop for your other butterfly plants. This vine could also be added to your edible garden — it will attract pollinators, and its fruit is a great addition to edible harvests.


An early-morning carpenter bee awaits the opening of the flower.


After the first year, if it’s in a favorable location, Passiflora incarnata will send up new shoots that could be several yards away from the original mother plant. These new plants often pop up in May, which led to the maypop name.

If these new shoots pop up in inconvenient places, you may transplant them early in the season and water them well until they are established in their new locations. One can never have too many, but sharing plants with neighbors is another good thing to do with extras.


Here’s a zebra longwing butterfly (Heliconius charithonia) taking nectar from a snow squarestem (Melanthera nivea). This is Florida’s state butterfly and is found in Florida, southern Texas and Mexico. Plant Passiflora incarnata in partial shade if you wish to attract these butterflies to your yard, in addition to a variety of nectar plants, as it’s the only larval host for zebra longwing.


Here’s a gulf fritillary butterfly (Agraulis vanillae) on a zinnia (Zinnia elegans). This butterfly is orange with black and white markings on the top sides of its wings, and beautifully iridescent on the undersides. Its range includes all of Florida west to eastern New Mexico and north to southern Illinois and Virginia. It will fly year-round in Florida and southern Texas. You may notice that its range is similar to Passiflora’s; this is not a coincidence, because it is the larval host. The gulfs prefer to lay their eggs in sunny locations.


This Passiflora incarnata leaf is host to both zebra longwing larvae, which are white with black spikes, and gulf fritillary larvae, which are brown with black spikes. The butterflies rarely lay their eggs on exotic species, so plant the natives to feed them. Real butterfly gardeners cheer when their plants are eaten. No poisons are used in a full-service butterfly garden.

Butterflies taste the plant with their feet to find their favored plants to lay their eggs on.


Sometimes the caterpillars are very hungry. The vines will grow back quickly, but it’s a good idea to plant more vines.

When the vine grows back, the new butterflies that fed on the leaves as caterpillars will lay eggs on the new growth, and the cycle will begin anew. In north Florida this may happen several distinct times during the season, but in south Florida it’s a continuous process.

More: Browse plants native to other regions of the U.S.

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