{"id":8292,"date":"2016-06-15T23:12:58","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T03:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=8292"},"modified":"2017-04-20T12:45:40","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T16:45:40","slug":"passion-for-a-flower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=8292","title":{"rendered":"Passion for a flower"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll never forget the first time I saw one. I had just moved to North Georgia and was taking a walk when this wild-ass flower caught my eye.<\/p>\n

I thought it was plastic\u00a0at first. It had\u00a0frilly fringes, purple petals with pink and white stripes, and a big yellow cruciform jumping out of the middle like a stripper out of a cake.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t believe it was real. Then I thought I’d discovered a new species. I was so excited!<\/p>\n

I called it the hippie flower and considered it my private possession, this rare creature that only I had seen. Because if other people had seen it too, why didn’t they talk about it excitedly at every opportunity?<\/p>\n

The next year, in Master Naturalist class, I learned it is a very common wildflower. In fact, lots of people consider it a weed. They will curse it while they’re pulling it up out of their garden.<\/p>\n

Passionflower is a vine with a sturdy root that seems to actually prefer<\/em>\u00a0poor soil. It will grow underground, overground, across the yard and up the bushes. It climbs like crazy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"passionflower<\/p>\n

The flowers pop everywhere along the vine and bees adore them. Then you end up with a juicy fruit the size of an elongated golf ball,\u00a0lip-smackin’ good.<\/p>\n

But it wasn’t until 2011 that I learned of passionflower’s\u00a0true magical powers.<\/p>\n

When I took my herbalism course, I learned to make tinctures and teas from the leaves, flowers and fruit. Passiflora incarnata<\/em> is a great anti-inflammatory and nervine, and it’s the go-to insomnia cure for herbalists.<\/p>\n

It isn’t an aphrodisiac as you might think from the name. No, the origin is much holier than that: Spanish priests who found it in South America called it “The Flower of the Five Wounds,” and saw in its parts the elements of the Passion<\/a>, the\u00a0crucifixion\u00a0of Christ.<\/p>\n

\"passionflower<\/p>\n

It is rather a miraculous plant. I stopped taking ibuprofen and when I have a muscle ache, I take passionflower instead. If I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s passionflower that calms me back to sleep.<\/p>\n

I’m a passionflower evangelist. I gave away many bottles of the tincture to friends and family and showed them how to make the tincture themselves.<\/p>\n

In 2013, I found\u00a0a source of passionflower for regular\u00a0harvest – a field at a farm where horses graze, never touched by chemicals. The passionflower from there makes a tincture that is so smooth and fine, it’s like 100-year-old Scotch.<\/p>\n

I wanted my own crop of fresh leaves at hand. Our front yard is not landscaped, so I transplanted some passionflower and said, “Go forth and multiply! Take over the yard!”<\/p>\n

It’s getting there. Last year I had five plants; this year I have 16.<\/p>\n

\"passionflower-2\"<\/p>\n

Today I got out of the car after my workout, and there they were – those wild-ass flowers – the first three passionflowers of the year.<\/p>\n

The penny for today\u00a0is a 2012, the year I planted Passiflora<\/em> in the front yard.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll never forget the first time I saw one. I had just moved to North Georgia and was taking a walk when this wild-ass flower caught my eye. I thought it was plastic\u00a0at first. It had\u00a0frilly fringes, purple petals with pink and white stripes, and a big yellow cruciform jumping out of the middle like … read more Passion for a flower<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[321],"tags":[52,1024,498,881,654,867],"class_list":["post-8292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tress","tag-52","tag-anti-inflammatory","tag-flower","tag-insomnia","tag-medicine","tag-plant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8292"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8305,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8292\/revisions\/8305"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}