THE PASSION FLOWER.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 923, 5 March 1881, Page 2

THE PASSION FLOWER.

It is not everyone who knows the history of the passion flower, and why it obtained that name. By some it is supposed to be an emblem of the vulgar passion — love — common to nearly all people at one age or another, generally in young persons, but sometimes in bald-headed toothless individuals, who ought to be preparing for the bed of death instead of the nuptial couch. The love which the passion flower was supposed to typify, however, was as high above the vulgar passion as the stars are above the earth, and was given by some Catholic priests, who followed up the footsteps of the great navigator Columbus, upon the vast continent of America, and the wonderful structure of the flowers suggested an analogy with the events of the Crucifixion, which enabled them to teach the heathens on the continent from a book of nature ever present and ever open before them. At the base of the petals, and encircling the corolla, are a number of conspicuous spines, w'hich they likened to the crown of thorns with which the brow of the Saviour was encircled, and the white portion of each spine forming a wavy circle of lighter shade, they likened to a nimbus of glory, with which the Lord was always represented in pictures. The pistil is divided into three black segments at the apex, and they are said to typify the three nails with which He was nailed to the cross. The five anthers are pierced by their filaments on the sharp points of which they are poised, and these suggest the five wounds, the resemblance being almost perfect at one stage. Then one of these wounds and the triple branch of the pistil was held to represent the cross, so that the passion flower afforded as ready a means of illustrating the story of the Crucifixion to the Chilians, Peruvians, &c., as the shamrock did in the hands of St. Patrick, when he wished to show the heathen Irish king how it was possible for the Trinity in Unity to exist. Before dismissing this pretty but true story of the origin of the name passiflora, applied to the order, it may be remarked that to the learned Catholic priests, whose zeal led them into the most distant w’ilds of nature in their endeovours to spread a knowledge, of their faith, we are indebted for a vast amount of botanical knowledge, and the discovery of the most valuable medicines and the handsomest plants in our possession—among these may be named the Peruvian bark and the lovely camellia.