Passion Fruit Diplomacy

For years, we’d been trying to entice two kiwi vines to create some shade over the picnic table in the backyard. We gave them questionable water during a drought, fenced them off from predatory puppies and toddlers. As the years passed, they just looked sadder and sadder. Finally, we dug them up and put in a single passion fruit vine, hoping for — well, hoping for nothing, really, but a bit of green. When a neighbor first offered me the withered purple fruit from her vine, I declined. The leaves appeared within a season and bolted up to cover the arbor. And then last spring: flowers! Delightful fireworks of purple and white. A flower people see their own stories in: for the Inca and Aztec people, the plant’s original cultivators, the flower’s whirl of spokes may have connected it to the sacred Sun. Friars returning from South America in the early 1600s found the five wounds of Christ and the 10 disciples in its petals. In India is is the Krishna Kamal, representing aspects of the…