How to Prune a Passion Flower

Hi, this is Yolanda Vanveen, and in this segment we're going to talk about how to prune a passion flower. Now passion flowers are such a beautiful plant in the garden. They make a vine and they'll go up a trellis or up a fence or anywhere that you want to grow them, and then they produce these little pink and purple flowers that are just delightful in the garden. And a lot of people claim that you don't need to prune them, that they will grow whether you prune them or not. But it's nice to go through and cut out a lot of the real wild vines or a lot of the dead vines here and there just because they look better and they'll grow thicker. And the goal is to have one main vine with some little vines coming off of it. Not just a lot of strangely Medusa vines. And so by cutting some of the little vines off you'll find that the main vine will grow much stronger and you'll get much more flowers. So you don't really prune them until they've started to grow and they're already on the bigger side because when they're first coming up, you won't want to chop it down because then it'll actually die back to the ground again and then you'll have to wait for it to grow. So as soon as it is any length at all and it'll start getting real wild, just prune some of those suckers right off and you'll find then that the main plant will produce a lot smaller suckers that'll give you lots more flowers in the end. And so as long as you wrap the suckers around the main plants and cut out any of the real wild ones, you can train your passion flower to grow in any shape and it'll go right up to the trellis or right up a tree and it'll bloom all summer long. And then just cut some of the dead branches out as well here and there. Try never to cut out more than one third of the plant at one time. And you can periodically trim out your passion flower. You don't have to do it all in one day. But make sure never more than one third of the plant in a year, and you will get gorgeous flowers for the next.