Best Medium for Rooting Purple Passion Plant

By David

Picture of purple passion plant sitting on kitchen counter. The plant has two long stems and several shorter ones. The stems and the top leaves are deep purple and the lower leaves are more green.

Purple Passion (Gynura Aurantiaca) is native to south east Asia but due to its low light requirements makes an excellent houseplant in other parts of the world. It’s main attractive feature is its brilliant purple hairs on its leaves which become more prominent in lower light levels. The plant grows stems vertically initially but once they get longer, they begin to vine along the ground. This means that when growing as a houseplant, it is often desirable to cut the stems back periodically to keep the plant compact and bushy.

Another advantage of pruning is that the cuttings root readily, giving additional plants. In nature, this is one of the reasons the plant tends to creep along the ground as it will tend to grow roots along the stem.

Image showing four cuttings in front of the pots of solid potting media. In the left hand corner of the image is the mother plant

To keep the comparison fair I made sure that each cutting had two rooting nodes and at least two leaves.

I figured that I had roughly enough growth for four cuttings so decided to test four different rooting methods to see which worked best. I settled on potting soil, sphagnum moss, perlite and water. I cut all the stems into lengths of at least 4 nodes and removed the lower two leaves on each node. For the cutting I put in water, I did have to remove some more leaves to allow it to fit into the jar but to keep the comparison fair, I only filled the water up to cover the lowest two nodes.

I didn’t do anything special with the cuttings, just placed them in their respective growing media and placed them in front of a window. The shelf I chose was lower down so doesn’t receive too much direct sunlight.

Image showing four cuttings in front of the pots of solid potting media. In the left hand corner of the image is the mother plant

This shelf gets some direct light around mid-morning but fairly bright indirect light for most of the day.

I will check on the cuttings every couple of days to ensure they stay moist and to see which one roots the quickest.