Passifloraceae
Passiflora incarnata
Passionflower · Maypop
- Part used
- aerial
- Native range
- Southeastern United States
- Morphology
- A herbaceous climber with three-lobed leaves and elaborate flowers — a fringed corona of purple and white filaments over five petals and five sepals, with prominent stamens and styles.
What is in it
Evidence
Small trials suggest reduced anxiety, including one comparing it to a benzodiazepine before dental procedures. Trials are small and often use combination products. Sleep evidence is weaker.
Safety
Generally well tolerated. Sedation, dizziness and confusion reported. Contains trace harman alkaloids with monoamine oxidase inhibiting activity — at levels too low for the classic MAOI interactions, but the theoretical concern is repeatedly raised. Contraindicated in pregnancy.
Interactions: Additive sedation with CNS depressants; Theoretical with MAO inhibitors
Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed ingredient. EMA traditional-use registration.
Historical use
Used by Cherokee and other southeastern peoples as food and medicine. Named by Spanish missionaries in South America, who read the flower as a diagram of the Passion — the corona as the crown of thorns, the three styles as the nails, the five stamens as the wounds.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
The passionflower is named for a piece of interpretation rather than for anything about the plant. Spanish missionaries in South America in the sixteenth century read the flower as a deliberate diagram of the Crucifixion — the corona as the crown of thorns, the three styles as the nails, the five stamens as the five wounds, the ten tepals as the apostles minus Judas and Peter — and used it as a teaching device.
It is a doctrine-of-signatures reading applied to theology rather than to medicine, and it stuck so firmly that the name is now the plant's name in most European languages.
Its own pharmacology has nothing to do with any of that, and is modestly encouraging: several small anxiety trials, one of them against a benzodiazepine before dental work, with results good enough to be interesting and a literature too small to conclude from.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.