Passiflora danielii | The Italian Collection of Maurizio Vecchia

DESCRIPTION:

This species reached Europe only recently and remains difficult to find. I grew it for a few seasons and managed to obtain a few flowers.

The flower stands out for its colour contrasts and for the corona marked by alternating bands that do not always follow a strict order. It is a slightly rebellious flower, and this very irregularity gives it a character of its own.

In the open flower, the corolla shows petals and sepals of a deep violet, with lighter shades towards the tip and a slightly translucent texture that reveals subtle variations in tone. The corona echoes the colours of the corolla but breaks them up and makes them more vivid, arranging them in a very dense array of thin filaments. The irregular sequences of dark purple, light violet and pinpoint white alternate without a fixed pattern and create a dynamic design, in which the colour contrasts give the corona a remarkable visual depth.

The author of this species is Ellsworth Paine Killip, born in 1890 and died in 1968, who in 1938 published the most extensive and influential work dedicated to the genus Passiflora, titled The American Species of Passifloraceae. In that work he proposed a detailed division of the genus into subgenera, sections and series, a taxonomic structure that would remain the main reference until 2006. Passiflora danielii does not appear in this publication, since Killip described it separately in 1960 on the basis of a specimen preserved in a herbarium.

Passiflora danielii is an endemic species of the Department of Antioquia in Colombia, known exclusively from the municipality of Cocorná on the eastern slope of the Central Cordillera. The study “Rediscovery of Passiflora danielii Killip, 1960 (subgenus Passiflora): a threatened narrow endemic species of Colombia”, published in 2015 in the journal Check List by John Ocampo, Jorge Julián Restrepo and Wilmer Giraldo, documented the presence of the species in a few locations very close to one another within an extremely limited area, which is why it has been classified as Critically Endangered. This species grows between 1700 and 2100 metres in typical environments of the tropical Andes, with an average annual temperature of about 19 °C and annual rainfall exceeding 3400 mm, on slopes, roadsides and edges of secondary forest where the soil is rich in organic matter and remains constantly moist. The flowering observed in nature occurs in March and April.

In cultivation it is not an easy species. Since it comes from mountainous areas, it requires close attention both to minimum and maximum temperatures, as well as a suitable level of atmospheric humidity. Despite these demands, the uniqueness of the flower and its rarity make it a valuable plant, capable of rewarding anyone willing to provide the care it needs.