We have this amazing creeper growing up our wrought iron lamp posts. It is vigorous and seems to flower at this time of the year. It is not a conventional passion fruit vine in that the fruit is rather insignificant (oval orange-yellow berry) and not very exciting to humans. Birds and animals do eat them though.

Passiflora caerulea is a woody vine capable of growing to 15–20 m high where supporting trees are available. The base of each leaf has a twining tendril 5–10 cm long, which twines around supporting vegetation to hold the plant up.

The flower is complex, with the five sepals and petals similar in appearance, whitish in colour, surmounted by a corona of blue or violet filaments, then five greenish-yellow stamens and three purple stigmas.

This popular and showy plant has attracted a number of common names such as blue crown, flower of five wounds, southern beauty, wild apricot, Jesus flower. In Japan, it’s called the clock plant as it has 12 petals, central stamens and stigmas resembling a timepieces’s winding mechanism, and curly green tendrils resembling wound springs.

The specific epithet caerulea means “blue” and refers to the blue coronal filaments.