Here's a photo of passion vine (Passiflora incarnata) growing on a fence wire at Fairywood Thicket Farms. This Georgia wildflower seems fantastically, gratuitously complex, but then what in nature isn't? For some reason, this flower just makes you notice unexpected beauty and complexity. Missionaries were taken with it and attached religious symbolism to the various floral parts, using the flower as a teaching tool to spread Christianity. To caterpillars of fritillary butterflies, it is their host plant, and they make an interesting juxtapsoition with their food, all black and red and spiky and hungry, then they pupate into gratuitously beautiful chrysales and emerge as black and orange butterflies studded with pearly spots. They flit through the sunlight and nectar on zinnias and verbena and most any other flower. The fruits of this plant are hollow and rather tangy. I suppose the hollowness is how they got the name 'maypops', though May would be very early for them around here.
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