Scarlet Passionflower Passiflora coccinea
Scarlet Passionflower is an introduced perennial vine, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 7 ft.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 7 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~5 caterpillar species
Passiflora supports ~5 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Passiflora in North America, including:
+ 2 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Passiflora is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Wildlife & visitors 14 mammals · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Scarlet Passionflower — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 14 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Passiflora →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (17) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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