Passionflower Constance Elliot

Last year I wrote a post about passionflowers and said that I’d just planted the passionflower ‘Constance Elliot’ in the garden. I’m happy to tell you that it has come into flower for the first time. Hooray!

The flowers are smaller than those on the other two passionflowers I grow (‘caerulea’ and ‘Amethyst’) but that may be because the soil where it’s growing isn’t exactly wonderful. Luckily, passionflowers are drought-resistant, so the low rainfall here isn’t a problem.

The passionflower is now spreading itself comfortably around a vine-covered arbour and helps to create a shady sitting-place. (Very much needed this year!) The vine is in need of a good haircut, so it may be tricky to avoid cutting the passionflower by mistake. Passionflowers grow fast, but I want it to get well established so that it isn’t simply smothered by the grape-vine.

(And if you’re wondering, yes, we do get edible grapes growing in the garden here in Suffolk. But only just! They’d probably be sweeter if I knew how to prune and look after the vine properly – that’s a project for the near future.)

For the past week or two, I’ve been happily photographing the newly-emerging flowers. They don’t last long, so you need to be quick to catch a flower that’s still fresh. And, in this garden, you need to be especially fast to get to the flowers before slugs or snails can take greedy chomps out of them. (They sometimes eat my clematis flowers too – nothing more annoying than finding that the beautiful flower you wanted to photograph has suddenly got a big hole in it!)

The flowers photographed outside have a freshness and elegance, particularly where they have a background of lush green leaves. However, to get close to the detail of the flower, I picked one and brought it into my little studio.

The flower was set on a small ‘light-table’ that’s lit from below, with a soft light coming from above. This shows up the difference between the heavier sepals that provide the outer protection to the flower while it’s still in bud and the thinner, more translucent inner petals. You can see that there is quite a lot of green in the sepals – much more than you’d think when you see the flower growing outside.

Well, I’m going to go and take some more passionflower photos. And I’m hoping that ‘Constance Elliot’ will survive the next winter and provide more lovely flowers (and the opportunity for more photographs). You can see my earlier post about passionflowers here.