The Strangest Flower In The Sonoran Desert Smells Like A What?

Passiflora mexicana

Not a common plant, but where it grows, it creates nice stands of perennial vines climbing up into the mesquites.  A two-lobed passion vine leaf, most commonly they have three.  It likes moist places in riparian zones and these special places are becoming less common.  Find some before they're gone.

The herbalists among us know of the passively sedative qualities of this family of medicines, a reliable, if feebly potent anti-depressant. How I found this strange Venusian looking flower is, for me, a true example of applied ethnobotany, or how plants whisper, or how the monkey finds the banana, and how the philosopher finds the stone.

In the second year of working a vegetable garden in an east Tucson mesquite bosque, I finally stopped what I was doing in order to investigate a persistent, oddly fetid aroma wafting in the humid monsoon-time air.  You see, friends of the Desert Magic Toad can attest to the weird aroma of freshly vaporized Bufo alvaruis venom.  Like its chemical relation dimethytryptamine, the smoke smells like a heady mix of sasquatch scat, roses, and sex.  Well this particular flower, it turns out, churns out the exact aromatic signature as the hyperdimensional incense of the sacred smoke of toad venom.  So initially, the question was why am I smelling toad venom in the garden?  I believe that you were with me, Miss Wendy, when following my nose to a stand of healthy mesquites where I was looking on the ground for a squished toad, I looked up and saw this amazing flower from space.

So here's where the applied ethnobotany happens.  I already happened to know from my reading on the genus Passiflora that these medicines are manufacturers of harmine and harmaline, a class of compounds which are monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), these types chemicals often being designed into our primitive big pharma antidepressants.  Additionally, harmine and harmaline are moderately active psychoactives whose presence in the Amazonian shamanic medicine ayuhuasca is the catalyst for the amazing psychedelic effects of the aformentioned dimethyltryptamines, which are supplied by a second plant source and mixed together to create the mystic Amazonian brew, the breakfast of shamans.

So, what have we here?  A plant whose flowering aroma mimics that of the very medicine whose combinatorial effects might be an endemic, convergent habitat, desert ayuhuasca?  Clearly, this association was specific enough to signal the hippie to start beating the bushes in search of the sacred, but humble, unspoken thing.  When the monkey eventually peels this banana, I'll let you know how it tastes.