Apparently old habits do die hard. Rumor has it that the Texas A&M Aggies have taken their rivalry with The University of Texas off the football field and in to the garden.
The Houston Chronicle reports that the Texas A&M Aggies may have spread and planted maroon bluebonnets all around the iconic UT tower. “There were just a few at first but now there’s much more,” said Markus Hogue, program coordinator for UT Irrigation and Water Conservation. After planting regular bluebonnets around campus, and finding the maroon flowers focused around the tower, suspicions were that a few green-thumbed Aggies did some gardening near UT’s iconic tower.
Pictures of the maroon bluebonnets took to Twitter by storm as TAMU tweeted this picture:
These Aggie-created maroon bluebonnets are blooming all over Texas! Where have you seen them? #tamu pic.twitter.com/sd5IUD9I7v
— Texas A&M University (@TAMU) April 10, 2014
Though they haven’t taken credit for planting the flowers around the tower, TAMU has taken credit for breeding the maroon bluebonnets. “They took red ones and isolated them, and continued to select them until there was only maroon left,” said Skip Richter of Texas A&M.
I guess now that the Longhorns and the Aggies don’t get to duke it out on the playing field, they’ve had to resort to other measures. All you Longhorns need not worry though, according to the the University of Texas’ Alumni Magazine, The Alcalde, “nature will destroy” the Maroonbonnets. Though the maroonbonnets won’t have staying power after this year, clearly the Texas / Texas A&M rivalry does.
