Beautiful plants!!
We have a lot of passion flowers and take them in every year. We have found that if you keep them well watered outside, they survive perfectly well even after a slight frost. Best to bring them in before that, but the cautious approach is rarely one I take.
Note that these vines tend to climb and attach by tendrils, not by wrapping themselves tightly around things stem-wise (like mandevillas). This means that if you have the patience to snip or slice lots of tendrils, the job of pulling the plants from the fence is easy, if a bit tedious. I will confess that you can even lapse from cutting all (or any) tendrils and just give a good steady hard PULL (as long as you are not pulling the main vine stem itself against an edge or around a bend) and usually get this vine out of a fence without major damage.
Of course, you can much more easily cut the things back to the point where they first become enlaced with the fencing, bring them inside, and they'll do well indoors in a sunny spot, watered lightly but regularly. But if you're game, you can save a great deal of the total length without undue effort. Start at the end of one part of the vine, follow it back to the point where it turns around a corner, snip tendrils if you care to be gentle (I was, at first) and pull it back through the fence to that point. Repeat this with each length of vine until you reach the point where that part of the vine joins another branch. Then go to another end of vine, do the same thing (again, using either the snip-tendrils approach, or the old-fashioned yank), until you've gotten all parts of the vine you choose to save out of the fence. You'll have stripped some leaves off, but that's fine. You may have bent some of the vines, but that is not always fatal with passions.
I used this approach so I'd have vines of maximum length to transport and transplant in a tropical location, Vieques, Puerto Rico. Simply cutting back the vines may be the best approach for life indoors up north --though long vines have lived inside here in DC for us, and had a great head start for the next season.
As an indication of this plant's vigor and tenacity, I'll describe the rest of my approach to transporting them (successfully) from the wintery north to the year-round warmth of the tropics. I disentagled 13 plants as described above --most were fully 15' to 20' long, and multi-branched. I lined up and coiled each plant's multiple lengths, so they looked like wreaths, then tied them with velcro tape. I then took a radical experimental step (since I could not transport the weight of the 13, 5-gallon pots of soil). Using a "jet" setting on my hose nozzle, I forcibly washed the potting soil completely away from each one (all appeared almost root-bound when I started), until I had a mass of nearly clean, white roots which weighed nearly nothing. Lost a fair amount of the root material doing this, which scared me a bit, but I was getting fed up and was determined to see if my apporach would work, so I was merciless.
Once I had 13 bare rooted plants, I sprinkled those moisture crystals (about 1 TBS each) onto each one --spread the root mass out flat, sprinkled the crytals on, then folded up roots to enclose the stuff. Then I put each one into a quart ziploc bag, poured in about a cup of vermiculite, zipped closed to the main stem, and shook. I kept these bags watered with a mild solution of plant food for more than a month indoors. Most leaves fell off during this period, but I then packed them all up in a suitcase weighing a total of about 20 lbs, flew them to Puerto Rico, replanted by washing Promix into the root mass, and lost only one of the plants (I think it was overwatering, actually). I put the re-soiled plants into the ground or irrigated pots and have gotten very growth --all along the vines in most cases. We now have lots of healthy plants in an environment where I no longer worry about frosts.
Attached picture shows the vines I planted at Christmas time as they appeared in March.
This message was edited Oct 7, 2007 11:59 AM
This message was edited Oct 7, 2007 11:24 PM
This message was edited Oct 7, 2007 11:24 PM
This message was edited Oct 7, 2007 11:25 PM
This message was edited Oct 7, 2007 11:25 PM
This message was edited Oct 7, 2007 11:26 PM
