Today we are going to give you some tips to help you succeed with overwintering passion flowers. How easy and how much success you have is based upon a lot of variables. Some cultivars are easier to overwinter than others. Also some climates and environments make overwintering easier than others. As a rule, passion flowers generally don’t make very good house plants, but if you have a suitable space and want to try to overwinter passion flowers, read on!
Lets start by assuming that you do not have a greenhouse and wish to overwinter a tropical plant that does not go dormant inside your house. We will move on to overwintering more cold hardy varieties. And finally get to overwintering plants outdoors.
The biggest hurdle to bringing a passion flower in side is that they need LIGHT, LIGHT, LIGHT.
This is probably the area where people go wrong more than anything else. Passion Flowers are obligate full sun plants. They are not happy in shady conditions. If they do not have enough light, they will literally slowly starve to death losing leaves one by one until they are dead.
The reason so many people go wrong with light is two fold. Human eyes are remarkably adept at adjusting to different light conditions. So you perceive inside your sunny living room to be similarly bright to outside. However, if you were to actually measure the amount of light in both places you’d discover that you are very wrong. Your plants perceive your “bright” living room to be as a dark dungeon as compared to even a shady spot outside.
The second reason is that people think that my other houseplants are happy and doing well here therefore its enough light. This is also faulty reasoning as the vast majority of standard house plants are under story plants adapted to growing in the shade. This shade adaption is what makes them good house plants. They don’t need or even want bright, full sun type light.
So what does this mean for your indoor passion flower?
They need to be placed right up against the glass in a south facing window where they will get direct sunlight on them for at least 6-8 hours a day. If you cannot provide this, or your plant is dropping a lot of leaves, you should add grow lights. If in doubt give them more light. You cannot provide them too much light indoors, but you can easily provide them far too little.
While getting enough light is your biggest hurdle. In addition to light, you will need to keep tropical varieties above 50 degrees, 70 is better. You also need to be careful about watering. You can continue to water and fertilize your plants as needed throughout the winter.
Just be careful about over watering, particularly during the transition from outside to inside. Depending on how dry it inside your house, sometimes water usage declines significantly when you bring the plant inside and they stop growing rapidly. Be sure not to waterlog the soil which will cause your plants to get root rot.
Lastly, you will most likely have to contend with spider mites.
Passion flowers and spider mites go hand in hand. Typically when grown outside natural predators keep them in check, but they often have a population explosion when moved to an indoor environment. Then can be managed safely for your house and pets by spraying the plant with Neem Oil as needed.
If you wish to overwinter a more cold hardy passion flower, the above conditions still all must be met, with the exception of temperature. All of our cold hardy or cold tolerant varieties can be overwintered in a space that stays above freezing. Most of them will go semi-dormant. They will stay green (and still need light), but will not be actively growing. These varieties can be overwintered in a cool basement or a garage provided you can supply enough light. You can also overwinter them inside your house the same way as was discussed above for a tropical variety.
One thing that is very easy to go wrong with keeping dormant passion flowers in a cold environment is root rot.
The plants are extremely susceptible to rot in cool, damp conditions. So it is imperative that your pots are well drained, and that you water very sparingly and only if necessary. You might go from watering once a day mid summer to once a week or less during the winter. You will also still need to watch for spider mites, though in cool temperatures they are much less apt to develop into a problem.
Lastly, we will touch on overwintering a passion flower outside. Generally speaking, if you wish to overwinter a passion flower outside, it is best to do it in the ground. To survive winter, plants in containers need to be hardy to at least one to several zones lower than your actual hardiness zone. Given the generally tender nature of the Passiflora genus, containers don’t usually work. You will need to select a variety that is cold hardy to your zone. Keep in mind that passion flowers can be short lived and marginally hardy, so if you can select something for a zone lower all the better.Then you will need to select a good spot.
Site selection will make or break your overwintering success.
It absolutely must be extremely well drained. If your plant sits wet over the winter it WILL die regardless of whether its supposed to be hardy in your climate or not. Try to find a spot that is not only well drained, but also a warm, sheltered micro-climate. In the fall you can heavily mulch your passion flower to help protect it.
Unless you live in a frost free climate, your plant will die back to the ground. Once it has died back you can cut back the dead material. When it warms up in the spring you can remove the mulch and start watching for new shoots. In some areas passion flowers may overwinter in mild winters and die off during unusually cold winters, so it can be a bit of a gamble.
Passion flowers are notoriously late to emerge in the spring (hence the name maypop).
So give them some time before completely giving up on them. They should re-sprout from the roots. Sometimes that might be exactly where the plant stem was last season. Sometimes it will be only in the general area. Try not to disturb the area around the plant while you are waiting for the new shoots to emerge.
We hope these tips help you to succeed with overwintering your passion flowers. If you haven’t succeeded in the past, or have failed with some varieties, don’t despair. Try again with a different variety or a different setup. There is likely something that will work for you, but because passion flowers are such a diverse group of plants rarely will everything work for everyone. So it might just take some trial and error to determine what’s best for your specific environment.
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