Too much time on my hands

So yesterday during my lunch break I left the office, walked down eight flights of stairs and proceeded to wander around the Texas State campus with a pocket full of passion flower seeds, which I scattered in likely places I passed.

The campus straddles the Balcones fault, with most of the campus on limestone hills and the rest--including the San Marcos River and Aquarena--on clay prairie. This should be prime passiflora territory. There's been talk of making the campus an arboretum because of all the trees and native plants found here, which make it a very beautiful campus indeed. But I've never seen any passiflora despite looking off and on for the last several years. Passiflora affinis is native to the Hill Country and is found in Hays County, but not on campus apparently. Neither is the more obscure p. tenuiloba. I didn't have seeds of those. Instead, I had seed of p. incarnata, the native "maypop" I collected last spring in Colorado County which has been enthusiastically growing in my back yard ever since. Their western edge of their native range ends at the Balcones fault. There's some overgrown wildscape around the edges of campus on the prairie that should be prime incarnata habitat. So hither and yon I walked, dropping down seeds and covering them with leaf litter in sunny, brushy margins of the campus.

There's a small spring arising from the hills that forms a modest stream that flows into a flood control wetland before draining into the San Marcos river. There's a little island in the middle of this wetland, maybe 100'x100', give or take. Since I didn't want to get muddy reaching it, I instead scooped up balls of black clay the size of peach pits, pressed a few seeds into each one, and pelted the island with several hundred passiflora seeds. It's isolated and relatively unmolested by groundskeepers, with scrubby trees and undergrowth along the edges and open meadow in the interior. Excellent passiflora habitat, in other words. And really, if only two of the seeds I distributed grow to maturity, birds and small animals will scatter seed from the fruit elsewhere on campus.

Just doing my part to improve biodiversity.

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