51/365: Lutea seed

Back in October, we made our annual family pilgrimage to the Texas Renaissance Festival. Near the end of the day, near the Wharfside Music Gazebo on the west end of the grounds, I noticed a vine growing up the side of a tree that looked very familiar. After a bit of memory searching, I realized that the small, lobed leaves had an uncanny resemblance to the affinis passion flower vine I used to have (which sadly died during the drought two years back). But it couldn't be affinis, because that's a species native to the Texas Hill Country, and doesn't grow this far east. Then it struck me--affinis was so named because of its very similar appearance to another, much more widespread, North American passion flower, lutea! I looked a little closer, and discovered many, many tiny blue-black fruit. Score me! I gathered a bunch and then placed them in my refrigerator once I got home for several months of cold stratification. I potted them up yesterday, so hopefully within a month I'll have baby lutea plants to plant out. And they're Texas native, too! (I had only one lutea plant before, one with nifty silver variegated leaves, but I managed to kill that one as well).

I've added lutea to my series of passiflora macro seed shots. Firstly, the lutea seed is about half the size of an incarnata or foetida seed, but that's not much of a surprise, as the passion flowers in subgenus decaloba tend to be smaller plants, with small leaves, flowers and fruit. If anything, I was surprise at how much bigger the seeds were than I expected. The seed roughly followed the traditional passiflora seed shape, but unlike other passion flower seeds I've photographed, the lutea seed does not show a dimpled, golf ball-like surface pattern, but rather a grooved one. Curious. I wonder if this is a common trait among decalobas? If I could only get my tenuiloba to fruit...

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