The flowers - those beautiful bluish, purplish, whitish flowers - have a kind a science fiction thing going on. In addition to all the usual parts, Passionflower flowers are topped off with two or three fringed whirligigs of threadlike bits stacked atop one another. It's all a bit Martian-seeming to me. It's no less beautiful for it, mind you, it's just alien-like, and not from-another-land alien, but from a galaxy-far-far-away alien.
The flower is not named for the passion wildflower lovers such as myself might feel for it, or the passion of the gardeners who might grow it, but for a bit of highly publicized martyrdom. As John Parkinson put it in 1629, "Some superstitious Jesuits would faine make men beleeve that in the flower of this plant are to be seene all the markes of our Saviour's Passion: and therefore call it Flos Passionis." How it works is like this: The leaf symbolizes the spear while the five sepals and five petals are the ten Apostles; Peter and Judas have been omitted for denying Jesus and betraying him, respectively. The five anthers symbolize Jesus' five wounds. The column of the ovary is the cross, the three stigmas the nails, and those fringed, science fiction, from a galaxy-far-far-away alien whirligigs are the crown of thorns. Leave it to a bunch of superstitious Jesuits to take a perfectly lovely flower and weigh it down with a bunch of totally unrelated hooey, huh?
The first medicinal uses of Passionflower were documented in Peru in 1569, where it was "discovered" by the Spanish doctor Monardes. A tea made with the leaves was taken as a sedative by the indigenous people throughout the Amazon, as did the Europeans upon its introduction there.
This calming tea found its way into North American medicine in the mid 1800s through its use by Native Americans and slaves in the south. The bruised leaves were also for headache, bruises and pain. It has also been used to treat colic, diarrhea, dysentery, epilepsy, eruptions, insomnia, neuralgia, neurosis, piles and spasms. The analgesic effects of Passion Flower were first clinically documented in 1897, its sedative effects in 1904. Antispasmodic, anxiolytic and hypertensive actions were clinically validated in the early 1980's.
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