Remember this strange alien flower from my post two weeks ago? It's the purple passionflower vine (passiflora incarnata), a plant native to Charleston, SC and a host plant of the Gulf fritillary butterfly. Aside from the life cycle of the butterfly that this plant promotes, its own life cycle is pretty cool, or maybe I should say delicious.
Once this flower is pollinated, it grows a green spherical fruit about the size of a lime. My 5 year old daughter saw one at the garden the other week, so we took it home to cut it open and investigate. The outside was dark green, the skin was firm, and the inside revealed a spongy pith and bland pulpy kernels. It looked unlike any other fruit we eat and the taste was disappointing, so we flung it in the compost and thought no more of it.
A week later I was at the garden on my own and I noticed fruits on the ground beneath the passionflower vine and they were yellow. It occurred to me that maybe we'd plucked an unripe fruit the previous week. I picked up one of the yellow fruits, still warm from sitting in the sun, and saw that the skin indented with gentle pressure from my fingertips. Curious, I dug a fingernail through the peel to find the same white spongy pith inside, but it was softer than the fruit we'd opened before. Once I peeled the pith out of the way I could see the seeds in the center, each one surrounded by a juicy bubble of passionfruit pulp. I raised the whole thing to my nose and inhaled the sweet aroma of passionfruit: sun-ripened, sweet and tart and perfect. Obviously I ate it all by myself and then picked a few more ripe ones off the ground to take home to my children. They were in awe of the transformation of the fruit from the unripe, bland and slightly bitter kernels to the ripened sweet and juicy packets that burst in your mouth. It just goes to show that there's always something new to learn and the garden is a great place for such discoveries!
