It may look like a strange, oversized celestial pendant, but jade vine is Earth’s natural bounty at its finest and it could be grown in your very own garden.
The perennial tropical jade vine—scientific name Strongylodon macrobotrys—is native to the humid rainforests of the Philippines.
However, this mesmerizing vine is also cultivated in Australia, South Africa, the UK, and the United States.
The jade vine is also sold in select specialist nurseries so that plant lovers can sample its unique magic for themselves at home.
The flowering vine produces huge bouquets of jade-colored flowers, each bunch containing hundreds of flowers and measuring upward of 1 meter in length. Each stem can grow up to 18 meters long.
The extraordinary color of the flowers owes to malvin and saponarin, two pigments that when planted in slightly alkaline soil affect a blue-green tone.
As the flowers eventually wither and fall from the stems, they turn from turquoise to a deep purple-brown.
In its natural habitat, jade vine plants its roots in the cool soil of the rainforest while its stems climb trees to reach the sun.
The flowers bloom in the canopies, nourished by sunlight and helpfully pollinated by bats at twilight—thanks to an abundance of sweet nectar and the plant’s luminous glow under cover of darkness.
The first jade vine was discovered in the Philippines by Western botanists in 1854.
It has since been successfully cultivated in the UK at Kew Gardens, the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, and the Eden Project in the south of England, and in the United States at Longwood Gardens, Naples Botanical Garden, Nicholas Conservatory and Gardens, and Franklin Park Conservatory.
In these nurseries, horticulturalists mimic the bats, the vine’s natural pollinators, whose numbers are also diminishing in the wild, by pollinating jade vine by hand.
Check out some of the selected photos below:
