Vitex heterophylla
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Dirt on the Keys

A plant geek sweats over, swears at, and celebrates in his own gardens
Tags >> Vitex heterophylla
I haven't been face-to-face with actual marijuana for, oh, 40 years. Tried it, didn't like it. So I was very slow on the draw in realizing that one of my vitex bushes is doing a serious pot imitation.
Here's the bush, putting out its lush eager Spring growth.
A foliage close-up. Look familiar?
And here's a shot of an actual marijuana. (Thank you, Google.)

They are amazingly similar, but pot has more leaflets than vitex. Seven instead of five. And pot leaves are two or three times as big.
But with pot, as with vitex, the puff I mean the proof is in the pudding. When the vitex blooms it gets narrow spikes of tiny lavender-blue flowers, not the odiferous buff-colored clumpy things of marijuana. OK, blue-ish with today's pot-imitating species, Vitex incisa. Perhaps this is the reason that if you only have one vitex, plant what everyone else plants, Vitex heterophylla. Here's one of those in bloom out in Wellfleet. Now that's colorful!
But you know me: If I have one of something, well why not have all of its cousins? So I grow Vitex incisa too. That's one of my, ahem, hardy passion vines, 'Incense', crawling through the vitex, and adding one of its flowers to the picture.
'Incense' is far and away the easiest of the passifloras to establish, and the flowers are are the biggest too.
Incredible. Sun in the Summer, good drainage in the Winter, and you should be able to get some 'Incense' in your garden almost anywhere in Zone 6.
A nice druggy coincidence there. The name if this variety, planted so near my inadvertently pot-like Vitex, really is 'Incense'. Just as incense tried to do with pot in real life (I'm told), this 'Incense' is trying to cover up this "pot." Even better: 'Incense' was developed by the US Government, who was trying to create a hardy passion vine with an agricultural fruit crop. But instead—you can just hear those dweeby DOA guys saying "darn!—all they got was a hardy passion vine with incredible four-inch blue flowers. That still doesn't explain why they named it 'Incense', though. Maybe they were smoking something that day? A thought.