The Challenges Of Blogging About a Passion Flower

This week I meant to write a long post about the passion flower vine I added to my garden a few weeks ago.  I wanted to write about the incredible flowers that are blooming every day now, about its fast growth doubling in size in just three weeks, and about the fact that the vine is slowly but surely trying to get into my house.  I meant to write all this, but I didn't.

When blogging about my garden, it is very easy to write posts that have been written and re-written all over the net.  I have a few container plants that are quite common, and the simplest thing to do would be to write about how to take care of them, how the changes in weather is affecting them, how they are growing and so on.  I have done this in other posts for other plants, and I was planning to do just that with the passion flower, this is a log of my plants after all.  

As I was doing my research on the plant, I realized, why do I have to repeat what's out there, what value is my blog post going to add to the reader? The challenge then became, how to write something interesting about the passion flower that the readers can enjoy, without repeating what others have written many times before.  

In my search to find interesting posts, one of two things normally happens.  An idea may come to me, which I then try to support with good pictures.  Alternatively, the garden will show me something interesting, where I take the pictures first, and then I try to explain it in a blog post.  It is not always clear which comes first, but I do find myself in situations where I have pictures, but no post, or the other way around.

Coming back to the subject, I have taken quite a few pictures of my passion flower now, but the post still eludes me.  What can I write about a passion flower that no one has written about before.  How can I look at this from a different angle?  Nothing comes to me, I find myself uninspired. It's such a wonderful plant, however, that I still take pictures to mark its progress, and this brings me to another point.  Are the pictures any good? Not really.

Summer has come all of a sudden, two days ago, without warning.  My garden has turned into a dust bowl, full of soil blowing in from the surrounding fields.  With no rain to wash them down, my plants look like they have been abandoned for years gathering dust, even though it has only been a few days.  Not the ideal environment to take pictures. I could spend a few hours hosing them down, trying to get the soil off the leaves, letting them dry, and take a few pictures for my blog post, but it's too much work in this summer heat.  

So here I find myself with no post, and dusty pictures.  I am waiting for the vine to crawl in some unexpected manner, or to do something so outrageous as to warrant a blog post.  In the meantime, I check on it everyday, train it, teach it how to crawl in the right direction, talk to it, and marvel at its beautiful flowers.  I still take pictures, perhaps they can catch something I missed.  Until that day comes, however, my post about the passion flower is going to have to wait.