About 12 hours ago a neighbor sliced up and removed the stump / roots of a rather large passion fruit vine from their backyard. Their yard shares a wall with my yard, so over the years a large amount of passion fruit vines grew from theirs into my yard too and yielded lots of tasty fruits (prior to this I've never had any troubles with the neighbor so not sure why they cut it but that's a different thing I'll figure out separately).
Is there any way for me to save the part of the vine that's in my yard? I know very little about gardening but willing to learn. I imagine I'm out of luck since there is no stump or root system, but hey it never hurts to ask and brainstorm. The current (probably now in the process of dying) vine occupies an area on my fence of about 4 feet tall by 20 feet wide, so it's quite a lot of vines. I've counted 3 "really thick" stalks of vine near the ground, each about 1/2 inch thick, where the neighbor made cuts, and my guess is these thick stalks are where water from (now absent) roots/stump is routed through to all of the smaller vines above. See photos. For now I've put those sliced ends into containers of tap water (not sure if this will really do anything or if there's a better thing I could do). I did a vast amount of googling for possible solutions but it seems most cases of vine damage are different from this, in that people still have the stump/roots available to work with, or they are trying to propagate/create new plants from cuttings or seeds. Whereas in my case, I'm trying to save as much of the existing vines as possible, even though there are no roots/stump to work with. Aside: I did in fact make some small cuttings by following a tutorial (using the normal smaller 1/8 inch thick parts of the vine) and I put those cuttings in water to hopefully grow roots as a "just in case", but of course those cuttings will take many months to grow and won't help save the current vines on my fence from dying. It's painful to lose many years of progress of passion fruit vine growth.
Here are a few specific questions/ideas:
Is it possible I could buy a new stump/root system from a store, and graft onto it the base of the thick stalks (about 1/2 inch thick) shown in the photos? What are the odds of this working? Has anyone ever tried something like this?
Is it possible to use sections of the 1/2 inch thick stalks as some kind of "super" cutting? Which might grow faster or bigger than doing the normal small 1/8 inch thick stalk cuttings from the leafier section of the vines.
Does it help at all that I've submerged the ends of the 1/2 inch thick sliced off stalks into containers of water? I've read somewhere that sometimes a plant can heal itself better by first drying out a bit rather than being submerged in water.
Any chance the thick 1/2 inch stalks could grow new roots from the nub/base where they were sliced off? Maybe with some root growth hormone powder?
Even if I can't save the current vines on my fence, might there be a way to at least slow down the rate of their death? If I can keep the vines green-ish for another 2 weeks or 2 months then I still consider that quite useful.
Any other suggestions/ideas? Even if they seem really far out. (As one extreme example, might it be possible to find an already-large passion fruit vine somewhere else and transplant it into my yard & onto my fence? Has anyone had success with something like that? Another idea: maybe there is a different species of vine which grows extremely fast and could quickly re-cover-up this large section of my fence?)
Many thanks for your thoughts/ideas.
