[ Lost in the Landscape ]

what’s eating you

No gar­den project seems to ever be com­plete, but we did put the fin­ish on the bog bench we’ve spent a lot of time work­ing on.

We used this stuff, Superdeck. It took already good-looking wood and turned it into some­thing almost like a nice fin­ish on fur­ni­ture. Over the last few years we’ve tried var­i­ous ways to fin­ish ipe used out­doors and this stuff seems to give it the most durable and attrac­tive fin­ish. They haven’t paid me a cent to say this. I like the stuff.

Twenty feet from the bog bench Stapelia get­tl­ef­fii has opened its first flow­ers of the sea­son. I’ve men­tioned before how this plant is one of an infor­mal group of carrion-scented plants that are pol­li­nated by flies.

Back at the bog bench this Sar­race­nia alata, vein­less form, is hav­ing a hard time hid­ing the fact that it’s had a lot of bugs–most of them flies–as meals this sea­son. Just look at how the pitch­ers sud­denly turn dark as you go down the tube. Dead bugs inside. Lots of them.

Midsummer’s edi­ble high­light is the ripen­ing of the figs, and this one is about thirty, forty feet from the bog bench..

One of the annoy­ing neme­ses of fig grow­ers is this shiny lit­tle guy below, the fig bee­tle. It has the unpleas­ant habit of break­ing the fig’s skin and then feed­ing off the suc­cu­lence inside. I can’t say that I blame them, but I want the figs all to myself.

For some rea­son they seem cap­ti­vated with this one plant in the bog, the “green” form of Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla, a form that lacks the abil­ity to make the red­dish antho­cyanin pig­ments. I’ve noticed that the pitch­ers of this plant have a dis­tinct damask-rose aroma. Maybe the scent reminds the bee­tles of the flo­ral notes of figs?

What­ever the case, at least one of the bee­tles got a lit­tle too inter­ested in this pitcher and fell in. It was grue­some to watch as it tried to fight its way back out of the pitcher, strug­gling so hard it kicked a big hole in the side of this tube. It took at least three days to die.

There’s a cer­tain streak in many car­niv­o­rous plant afi­ciona­dos that seems to delight in the bug killing aspect of these plants. I’m not one of them. My father spent much of his life as a Bud­dhist, and I’m sure some of its tenets of non-violence against the uni­verse rubbed off on me. I found it unset­tling to walk by the pitcher and watch this hap­pen­ing. A slow death by star­va­tion and dehy­dra­tion, head-down into a pile of dead bugs–not the way I want to leave this earth.

So I put on my rosy gog­gles of denial and look at the plants in the bog. This is one of the more spec­tac­u­lar ones right now, named ‘W.C.,’ it’s a polyg­a­mous hybrid involv­ing S. leu­co­phylla, S. rubra and S. psittacina.

Still, I’m reminded of the obliv­i­ous pet-owner’s line: “He’s a cute puppy isn’t he? Why, no, it doesn’t bite.”

Yah right. Pretty, evil things…

July 31 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: benches • bog garden • carnivorous plants • fig beetles • figs • hardscape • sarracenia • Stapelia gettleffii • Superdek | 8 Comments »

from seed, the labor-intensive version

While my last post was ded­i­cated to an easy seed prop­a­ga­tion project, this one details a cou­ple that were a lit­tle more labor-intensive. Still not hard, just a lit­tle bit more work to pull off.

Sar­race­nia Night Sky, a hybrid of S. leu­co­phylla and S. rubra gulfen­sis.

I’ve posted about my pitcher plants a few times before–Sar­race­nia species from the Amer­i­can South and some hybrids–and this is the first year I’ve tried sow­ing my own seed. All eight species (or nine, or ten or eleven, depend­ing on the expert you lis­ten to) are inter-fertile, and hybrids between all of them are pos­si­ble and have been made at one time or another. The hybrids, too, are gen­er­ally fer­tile, and you can go crazy with the genetic possibilities.

Sar­race­nia Dainas Delight, a com­plex hybrid of S. xWillis­sii and S. leu­co­phylla.

For cre­ative sorts you can arrange gar­den plants in inter­est­ing ways, but with this genus you could also design the very plants that you grow. If you live in the heart of pitcher plant coun­try, this might be a prob­lem. Bees could carry pollen from your hybrid plants to nearby native species and cre­ate some new unnat­ural hybrids. But the genus never crossed to this side of the Mis­sis­sippi River so Cal­i­for­ni­ans can play Doc­tor Franken­stein all they want with­out wor­ry­ing about mess­ing with the native pop­u­la­tion beyond our cas­tle walls.

Mature seed pod of Sar­race­nia flava.

So…I began in the spring mak­ing some hybrids, and the pods began to ripen in August, with the last pods just fin­ish­ing up ripen­ing right about now.

Closeup of the pre­vi­ous Sar­race­nia flava seed­pod. This one con­tained almost 500 seeds. You can see them prac­ti­cally jump­ing out of the pod.

The seeds require a cool, damp period in order to ger­mi­nate. I emp­tied the pods and put the seed in a plas­tic bag with a few strands of moist chopped sphag­num moss, one bag for each cross. And into the fridge they went for four weeks.

After this period of cold strat­i­fi­ca­tion I sowed the seed on the sur­face of chopped sphag­num moss which I’d lay­ered on the top of post filled 50/50 with a sand/peat mixture.

Next, I put the pots into a clear plas­tic box, poured in half an inch of stand­ing rain­wa­ter, closed the lid, and put them near a win­dow that faces south-southeast. If every­thing goes well–and it looks like it did–the seedlings begin to emerge in two to four weeks. Warmish weather is best, though you don’t have to be too fanat­i­cal. This batch expe­ri­enced the recent 90– to 100-degree days as well as many cooler days in the 60s. As long as the seed think it’s spring, they’ll begin to germinate.

That’s pretty much it. Some peo­ple place the seedlings under con­stant bright lights and 70-plus degree tem­per­a­tures for up to three years to speed them up to matu­rity. I’m hop­ing that bright day­light in a warmish inte­rior spot will give them enough of a boost that I don’t have to resort to the equiv­a­lent of putting the plants on steroids.

Year­ling sar­race­nia seedlings of the cross S. (Melanorhoda, Trif­fid Park x rosea lute­ola).

And here you see the rea­son why peo­ple might try to accel­er­ate growth. These are year-old seedlings from a cross by Brooks Gar­cia that I sowed a year ago, think­ing I’d prac­tice on some­one else’s cross before attempt­ing my own. I grew these in my unheated green­house which has fairly low, less-than-ideal light­ing con­di­tions. They did get some bot­tom heat dur­ing the cold­est months of the year.

Dros­o­phyl­lum lusi­tan­icum, a cou­ple months old.

The other car­niv­o­rous plants I’m prop­a­gat­ing this fall are of this Mediterranean-region species, Dros­o­phyl­lum lusi­tan­icum. While vir­tu­ally all car­niv­o­rous plants are crea­tures of swamps and bogs, this one is unique in that it comes from fairly dry areas with be lim­ited sum­mer rain­fall. Unlike the pre­ced­ing sar­race­nia bog plants, this species could actu­ally thrive in California’s wet-winter, dry-summer cli­mate with­out too much addi­tional life support.

Its com­mon name is “Dewy Pine” because the leaves have lit­tle ten­ta­cles tipped with sticky bug-catching fluid that looks like dew. But Barry Rice men­tions a much cooler moniker: Its Por­tuguese name trans­lates into “Slob­ber­ing Pine.”

This plant and the pre­ced­ing Sar­race­nia do catch insects. It’s a con­tra­dic­tion I’m try­ing to come to terms with. I plant a lot of Cal­i­for­nia native plants, which pro­vide nec­tar and other food for all sorts of winged and crawl­ing crea­tures. And then I have these lit­tle mon­sters that actively trap and con­sume them. Call me a man of con­tra­dic­tions. In the end I hope I’m doing lots more good than bad.

I only know of one seller who ships Dros­o­phyl­lum so you pretty much have to grow your own from seed if you want one. (I got my seed from the seed bank of the Inter­na­tional Car­niv­o­rous Plant Soci­ety.) The lit­tle black seeds have a hard coat that slows down ger­mi­na­tion. If you have some 220-grit sand­pa­per around that’s not a prob­lem. Just lightly–and I mean lightly–rub the seed between two sheets of the sand­pa­per until a patch of the black seed coat is worn away to reveal the white layer under­neath. Then pop them on top of the same mix­ture you’d use for ger­mi­nat­ing Sar­race­nia and keep the mix moist with good-quality water. Ger­mi­na­tion for me was about two to six weeks, no cold strat­i­fi­ca­tion necessary.

There you have it. With both of these kinds of plants it was a lit­tle more work than my last post grow­ing blad­derods from seed. But really, it isn’t that hard if you’re patient.

November 23 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: carnivorous plants • Drosophyllum lusitanicum • hybrids • sarracenia • seedlings • seeds • stratification | 14 Comments »

leaves more amazing than flowers

Sar­race­nia Leah Wilk­er­son pitcher and flower

Today I fea­ture some strik­ing pitcher plant leaves to mark the occa­sion of April’s Foliage Follow-Up, the blog meme begun by Pam of Digging.

The story goes that the early set­tlers mis­took the car­niv­o­rous trumpet-shaped leaves for flow­ers. And how could you blame them? These tall tubes formed from mod­i­fied leaves fea­ture inter­est­ing shapes and col­ors in the green-yellow-white-pink-red range, often with the col­ors form­ing strik­ing pat­terns. They’re eas­ily as inter­est­ing as most flowers.

Botanist Don­ald E. Schnell writes in Car­niv­o­rous Plants of the United States and Canada, “there seems to be noth­ing sub­tle about pitcher plants. Their gen­eral appear­ance begs atten­tion, and when we encounter them we are almost star­tled. But once we look for awhile, then wan­der among them, we can begin to peel apart lay­ers of sub­tlety and see many lit­tle secrets that col­lec­tive fit these plants so neatly into their bog habitat–and we still do not know all their secrets.”

Schnell has divided the car­niv­o­rous pitcher leaf into 5 dif­fer­ent zones, each with a dif­fer­ent mor­phol­ogy. The scary insect-eating and –digest­ing car­nivory takes place down in zones 3 and 4, the lower parts of the pitcher. But these pho­tos con­cen­trate on the backs of the top lid of these pitch­ers, the entire lid being what Schnell calls zone 1.

The top of the pitcher of Sar­race­nia Leah Wilkerson

Sar­race­nia Mardi Gras

Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla, red, Franklin County, Florida

Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla ‘Tarnok’

Sar­race­nia mitchel­liana. Within a few weeks the pitcher will be entirely maroon.

Sar­race­nia (flava x mitchel­liana). Plants with brown­ish leaves are often a hard sell, but I think this plant makes a good case that they can look rich and won­der­ful, not like dead leaves.

Sar­race­nia Judith Hin­dle

Sar­race­nia W.C.

Sar­race­nia Red Suma­tra. This early in the sea­son it looks more like Pink Suma­tra, but the color will darken before long.

Even though my sar­race­nia plants get to live in a cushy USDA Zone 10 gar­den (not to be con­fused with the zones of a sar­rece­nia pitcher), their inter­nal clocks seem more tuned in to sea­sonal cycles of daylength or rel­a­tive tem­per­a­tures than to absolute tem­per­a­tures. Most of the species and hybrids have been sus­pi­cious of San Diego’s warm cli­mate and keep their flow­ers and foliage devel­op­ing in the rhi­zomes all win­ter. Only now are most begin­ning to bloom and send out leaves, though maybe a lit­tle bit ear­lier than in the Amer­i­can South­east, where these plants originate.

As the sea­son pro­gresses, these leaves will often develop dif­fer­ent col­orations. The veins in some will grow more pro­nounced, some pitch­ers will go all-red, oth­ers will show a golden under­glow. The brief burst of spring flow­ers in these plants is great, but the foliage makes for months of really cool leaf-viewing.

For all sorts of other foliage hap­pen­ings in the gar­den world, check out the links in this month’s Foliage Follow-Up post at Dig­ging. Thanks for host­ing, Pam!

April 16 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: carnivorous plants • foliage follow-up • pitcher plants • sarracenia | 13 Comments »

“plants are up to something”">“plants are up to something”

I loved this ban­ner at the Hunt­ing­ton. Hang­ing out­side the instution’s con­ser­va­tory build­ing, it announces that the exhibits inside might be more ori­ented towards edu­ca­tion than the gar­dens that make up the rest of the grounds. The con­ser­va­tory also houses plants that might have spe­cial needs beyond the “just add water” plant­i­ngs located in the sub­trop­ics outdoors.

Pass through the front doors and you step into a green­house space con­tain­ing a minia­ture trop­i­cal rain­for­est, a cloud for­est and a bog gar­den, along with lots of edu­ca­tional signs and inter­ac­tive exhibits scat­tered through­out the space.

For me most green­houses and con­ser­va­tory gar­dens suf­fer from being exam­ples of nature-in-a-can, and to me they tend to look and smell and feel very sim­i­lar in their her­met­i­cally sealed spaces. If only the Hunt­ing­ton were located on some bar­ren snowy tun­dra plain, where enter­ing a trop­i­cal rain­for­est on a cold win­ter day might be a stun­ning revelation.

Even on this cool Decem­ber South­ern Cal­i­for­nia after­noon, the tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ences between inside and out weren’t that pro­nounced. And the lush plant­i­ngs out­side the front door seemed to mir­ror the lushly planted indoors. Still, lack­ing the stun­ning con­trasts that might help to set the con­ser­va­tory apart from the out­doors, it was a fun place to con­nect with a lot of cool plants. When the Huntington’s giant corpse-flower (Amor­phophal­lus titanum) blooms, there is where you’ll find it. It wasn’t bloom­ing, but there were lots of other inter­est­ing things inside.

The bright red-orange trunks of the sealing-wax palm, Cyr­tosstachys renda were pretty amazing.

My visit was two days before Christ­mas, so there were this hol­i­day dis­play of poin­set­tias and amaryl­lis. At first they seemed like gra­tu­itous hol­i­day dec­o­ra­tions but then the aha moment struck me that these plants orig­i­nate in the trop­i­cal and sub­trop­i­cal belt of the Americas.

Flo­ral parts of a large anthurium species…

This car­niv­o­rous Asian pitcher plant (a species of Nepenthes) greeted vis­i­tors as they entered the cloud for­est display.

And drop­ping down into the bog gar­den, Amer­i­can pitcher plants, Sar­race­nia, and sun­dews, Drosera sp., let view­ers see other ways plants have taken up car­niv­o­rous ways. (Do you detect a theme of the con­ser­va­tory play­ing up the idea of scary, creepy plants, going from these car­niv­o­rous species to the stink­ing giant corpse flower that lines up vis­i­tors by the hun­dreds when it does its thing?)

At this point the blog­ger ram­bles on a bit: These days it almost seems that every botan­i­cal col­lec­tion feels to have its very own giant corpse flower plant that will draw the vis­i­tors when it blooms, some­thing of the way medieval churches tried to draw pil­grims by hav­ing unique relics of saints, or how many tem­ples in Asia will claim to have pre­served hairs of the Bud­dha. So it seems that the giant corpse flow­ers has become a mod­ern sec­u­lar botan­i­cal relic. It’s a lit­tle odd, since you can occa­sion­ally find the plant for sale on eBay–granted for a good chunk of change–but still noth­ing much more than you’d pay for a pair of high-end jeans.

Okay, now back to the trip…

I’m com­ing to the real­iza­tion that green­houses always scare me a bit, like I’m enter­ing a world that’s on per­pet­ual life sup­port. Upon leav­ing the con­ser­va­tory I stepped out­side into the bright Decem­ber after­noon. Not far away a reader was seated in warm­ing sun­light on a Lutyens bench, enjoy­ing the moment. I’d had a good time on my visit to the syn­thetic trop­ics, but return­ing to the real sun­shine and real weather out­doors I sud­denly felt free.

January 04 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Amorphophallus titanum • carnivorous plants • conservatories • greenhouses • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • tropical plants | 11 Comments »

tomatoes are carnivorous plants?

One of the car­niv­o­rous plant lists I’m on has been buzzing a bit lately about an arti­cle that appeared in the Botan­i­cal Jour­nal of the Lin­nean Soci­ety, “Mur­der­ous plants: Vic­to­rian Gothic, Dar­win and mod­ern insights into veg­etable car­nivory.” (See the abstract: here.) What really got things going was a sen­sa­tion­al­ized story in the Lon­don Tele­graph, with the catchy title: “Toma­toes can ‘eat’ insects!” (The excla­ma­tion point is mine, but it seemed right for many titles pub­lished by the Tele­graph.)

The basic premise is that hairs on tomato plants can catch and kill some small insects. The dead insects fall to the ground and nour­ish the plant. The botan­i­cal tech­nique is called “pas­sive car­nivory,” in oppo­si­tion to the active car­nivory prac­ticed by plants like sar­race­nia that have means to both cap­ture and digest prey.

It’s kin­duv a stretch, pulling a num­ber of plants into what before was a select club of car­ni­vores. The Tele­graph arti­cle men­tions “petu­nia, orna­men­tal tobacco plants, some vari­eties of pota­toes and toma­toes, and shepherd’s purse, a rel­a­tive of cab­bages.” The Lin­nean Soci­ety abstract goes on to men­tion plants “such as Sty­lid­ium (Sty­lidi­aceae), some species of Poten­tilla (Rosaceae), Pro­boscidea (Mar­ty­ni­aceae) and Gera­nium (Gera­ni­aceae), that have been demon­strated to both pro­duce diges­tive enzymes on their epi­der­mal sur­faces and be capa­ble of absorb­ing the products.”

That got the car­niv­o­rous plant folks to stretch the def­i­n­i­tion fur­ther. What about New Zealand’s bird-eating para ara tree? Maybe even the Cal­i­for­nia fan palm with its haz­ardous saw­tooth peti­oles? While I’m at it I might as well add one of my own nom­i­na­tions: euca­lyp­tus, the Aus­tralian widow-maker. After our wind­storm Mon­day night I noticed all sorts of euca­lyp­tus branches on the ground. If you were around when some of the eight-inch-thick branches fell off, you’d be on your way to being nour­ish­ing com­post for the plants!

December 12 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: carnivorous plants • science | 11 Comments »

my carnivores in december

As win­ter approaches many of the plants in the bog gar­den are start­ing to retreat into dor­mancy. Sun­day I filled part of a bucket with the trim­mings from the bog and two trays of pot­ted car­niv­o­rous plants.

I have mostly Amer­i­can pitcher plants, sar­race­nia, and I’ve been start­ing to learn the rhythms of the dif­fer­ent species and hybrids. Many put out their main flush of growth in the spring and look pro­gres­sively scrap­pier and scrap­pier as spring turns into sum­mer, and sum­mer into fall. Many of these are now tidied up in the bot­tom of this bucket.

Oth­ers sync up with hur­ri­cane sea­son, pre­sent­ing their most spec­tac­u­lar pitch­ers in late sum­mer and fall when heavy rains can be expected in the Amer­i­can South­east. The white-topped pitcher, Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla, is the most charis­matic of these. At least two clones have been tissue-cultured and are com­monly avail­able, ‘Tarnok’ (to the left) and ‘Titan’ (to the right). In spring, a mature Tarnok will pro­duce big red dou­ble pom­poms of ster­ile flow­ers that will per­sist long into the year. The flow­ers being ster­ile, this could be con­sid­ered a culti­gen, a plant inca­pable of repro­duc­ing itself except by seduc­ing mem­bers of the human species to keep it alive via divi­sion or cloning. ‘Titan’ is sup­posed to have the unusual abil­ity to pro­duce pitch­ers over three feet tall, though in my too-dry, less than ideal con­di­tions, it’s not as good a grower and clumper as Tarnok.

‘Judith Hin­dle’ is another tissue-cultured, com­monly avail­able plant. I called this Sar­race­nia Trader Joe’s for a year because that’s where I bought this no-label plant. But I’ve decided it’s Judith Hin­dle because there was a whole big dis­play of plants that looked just like this one, and I’m fairly cer­tain that it’s the only hybrid that’s been tissue-cultured that looks and behaves like this. Like its leu­co­phylla grand­par­ent, it gives up its best pitch­ers in the fall.

Another plant that’s still got a few nice pitch­ers this late in the year is this red-lidded ver­sions of the species S. alata.

And this hybrid, ‘Super Green Giant,’ seems to be doing well late in the sea­son, though I’ve only had it since August and can’t vouch for what it’ll look like the rest of the year. Also, it’s lived a cod­dled life in a pot stand­ing in water, not one loosed in the out­door bog with these other plants.

Not every­thing is pitcher plants. This is the very easy-to-grow (some would say “weedy”) Drosera capen­sis, red form, a sun­dew from wet spots in South Africa. If you let it flower it will set seed. And if it sets seed, it can spread through­out your col­lec­tion. I’m try­ing to fig­ure out which of the bog plants can get by with less than boggy con­di­tions. So far this is one of them.

In addi­tion to the bog gar­den, I have two tubs of water with other plants. A very few are still look­ing pre­sentable this late in the year. Three hybrids in this tub com­bine to make a lively red-and-green dis­play: ‘Mardi Gras,’ ‘W.C.’ and a pri­mary hybrid, x mitchel­liana, made by Jerry Adding­ton of Court­ing Frogs Nurs­ery and retailed by Karen Oudean of Oudean’s Wil­low Creek Nurs­ery. All of these hybrids are one half or at least one quar­ter leu­co­phylla, so they retain some of its abil­i­ties to look nice in the fall. They also involve other species that tend to have a stronger year-round pres­ence instead of retreat­ing to a rhi­zome for the winter.

These trays of plants have moved from the unheated green­house, hope­fully to trig­ger the dor­mancy that most of these plants needs to thrive. Another hope is that they’ll get a taste of rain and not yet another drench­ing of reverse-osmosis water. After many weeks with noth­ing, they finally got treated to our first big storm of the sea­son. When I came home last night the trays had almost three inches of water in them. Real water. Free water from the sky. At last!

December 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bog garden • bog plants • carnivorous plants • Drosera capensis Red Form • rain • sarracenia • Sarracenia alata • Sarracenia Judith Hindle • Sarracenia leucophylla | 5 Comments »

sarracenia: an appreciation

So many inter­est­ing plants, so lit­tle time and space to grow them. My cur­rent plant obses­sion is the Amer­i­can pitcher plant genus, Sar­race­nia. I’m not alone in my obses­sion. Brooks Gar­cia even has a firm ded­i­cated to the genus which bears the name Sar­race­nia Obsessed. It’s hard to explain what causes a per­sonal obses­sion but let me try.

The plants of this genus of eight to eleven species all have evolved mod­i­fied leaves that form tubes that attract and cap­ture prey. A fly or an ant and goes for the nec­tar that the plant offers at the tip of the pitcher, and every few of the unfor­tu­nates slips on the slip­pery sur­face and is directed down far­ther into the tube by downward-pointing hairs on the inside of the leaf. Many of the species have a tube filled with diges­tive enzymes that await any crea­ture that makes it to the bot­tom of the tube. The insect even­tu­ally drowns, and is digested by the plant. Dinner.

Evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy has devised a num­ber of unpleas­ant ways its crea­tures can meet their ends. Being lured into a nectar-bated trap, then directed by needle-sharp hairs towards a nasty fluid that will start to eat you while you’re still a lit­tle bit alive sounds like one of the more grue­some exits to make. (I’ll never com­plain about another gru­el­ing din­ner party again…)

There are peo­ple who grow these plants where all this car­niv­o­rous unpleas­ant­ness is the main attrac­tion. A lot of these enthu­si­asts are men. Are car­niv­o­rous plants a guy-thing? All this eat-or-be-eaten machismo, Rambo non­sense, I won­der? But I guess I’m a lit­tle defec­tive as a guy—I love to cook and I watch Project Run­way for godsakes—and what really attracts me to these is how seri­ously gor­geous and inter­est­ing these plants are.

Take the case of the yel­low pitcher plant, Sar­race­nia flava. This species fea­tures an extended upright tube (back to that guy thing again, sorry) that’s capped by an attrac­tive lid that hov­ers over the open­ing. These plants live in bogs in lands of many rains, so the lid helps keep rain­wa­ter from dilut­ing the nasty fluid inside the tube. The basic struc­ture car­ries from one form of the species to the other, but sub­tle vari­a­tions in shape and extreme ones in col­oration could keep a col­lec­tor occu­pied for decades.

In my lit­tle col­lec­tion I have sev­eral of the col­ored vari­a­tions that have been described. The pitch­ers look best in the spring and are a lit­tle ragged this time of year. But you can get a basic idea of some of the dif­fer­ences between plants of this species.

Sar­race­nia flava var. max­ima sits at one end of the spec­trum, color-wise. The leaves are all a clean green­ish yel­low color—leaf color—with the only pig­ment being lit­tle patches of red­dish col­oration at the grow­ing point of the rhizome.

S. flava var. flava takes the basic pitcher back­ground color of var. max­ima and adds some strip­ing to the leaves. This is a ver­sion of this vari­ety with an extra-wide maw.

S. flava var. cuprea is also called the “cop­per top” vari­ety. The back of the lid can have a light bronze to dark choco­late col­oration. Some­times the color stays for the life of the pitcher, some­times it fades to green. In pro­longed full-sun con­di­tions this plant can have a won­der­ful dark choco­late top, plus some of the heavy vein­ing you’d find in some of the more heav­ily col­ored varieties.

Beyond these, there’s a var. rugelli, which has all-green col­oration accented with a maroon bloth in the throat, var. rubri­corpa, the “red tube” which has a red body topped with a veined hood, and var. atrop­ur­purea, which has such a heavy suf­fu­sion of red that the entire tube looks that color.

And that’s only one species. There are seven to ten oth­ers, depend­ing on the tax­on­o­mist you’re talk­ing to, with each of the oth­ers pre­sent­ing their own inter­est­ing vari­a­tions on the bug-eating pitcher theme. And all of these species can inter­breed, lead­ing to huge num­bers of hybrids. Check out all the Sar­race­nia pho­tos of species and hybrids at The Car­niv­o­rous Plant Photo Finder. You may end up spend­ing hours at this one site alone and never find a way out of this obsession.

October 25 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: carnivorous plants • pitcher plants • sarracenia • Sarracenia flava | 5 Comments »

on the road: visiting california carnivores

On our recent trip we had only one nurs­ery on the list of must-visit loca­tions: Cal­i­for­nia Car­ni­vores in Sebastapol.

Spe­cial­iz­ing in car­niv­o­rous plants from around the world, pro­pri­etor Peter D’Amato has assem­bled a col­lec­tion of species and hybrids that run the gamut from venus fly­traps and Amer­i­can pitcher plants to really cool sun­dews and bladderworts.

One of the first plants that you encounter is this massed group of the hybrid, Sar­race­nia x Dana’s Delight. It’s a fairly com­mon plant, but gather together sev­eral dozen pots of it in a massed dis­play and there’s noth­ing com­mon about it. The pitch­ers color up to a most amaz­ing pur­plish red when grown in strong sunlight.

Here’s another pitcher plant that had some gor­geous col­oration. I for­got to note the name–sorry–but I think it might be a form or hybrid of S. flava.

If there’s a pitcher plant that I covet it’s this one, the Cal­i­for­nia and Ore­gon cobra lily, Dar­ling­to­nia cal­i­for­nica. I’ve killed one already, and won’t attempt another until I’m more con­fi­dent that I can offer it what it needs to survive.

To grow so many dif­fer­ent kinds of plants requires a lot of space. Here’s a shot of the prop­a­ga­tion ponds.

I left the premises with three plants, a cou­ple more than I really have room for in my bog. I posted yes­ter­day about the amaz­ing fly-catching capa­bil­i­ties of the sun­dew I bought (Drosera fil­i­formis ssp. fil­i­formis ‘Florida giant’). Another plant was a divi­sion of an albino hybrid, Super Green Giant.

The third pur­chase was this beau­ti­fully col­ored ver­sion of the yel­low pitcher, Sar­race­nia flava. Here it is from the front…

…and here it is from behind.

…and for con­trast, here’s a form of this species with min­i­mal col­oration, ‘Max­ima.’ I love its yellow-green coloration.

The basic ele­ment of a pitcher plant is a highly devel­oped leaf struc­ture that con­tains a reser­voir of fluid that insects fall into. The bug even­tu­ally drowns, and the the digested insect turns into food for the plant.

The more I look at pitcher plants, the more I appre­ci­ate the dif­fer­ences between them. It’s like musi­cal vari­a­tions on a theme, where you start with some­thing sim­ple and rec­og­niz­able, and then go off into all sorts of amaz­ing directions.

Jenny was out to this coast for a fam­ily visit, and was along for this plant trip. Her pur­chases were two: a small but very pretty and cute blad­der­wort, Utric­u­laria livida, and a dis­tinc­tive lit­tle venus fly­trap, Dion­aea mus­cip­ula.

The husband’s reac­tion when we got back to the hotel went some­thing like, “You bought a venus fly­trap? To take all the way back to South Car­olina? Where venus fly­traps come from?” But Jenny is a a curi­ous plant per­son her­self, and the fly­trap she picked was a nicely grown spec­i­men that had strik­ing red col­oration unlike the typ­i­cal ver­sions of the species. Like pitcher plants, fly­traps can have their own sets of cool vari­a­tions on the basic theme.

August 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: California Carnivores • carnivorous plants • nurseries | 6 Comments »

on the road: every car should have one

I’m just back from a few days with fam­ily in Sebastapol, up in the Russ­ian River and Sonoma Val­ley wine coun­try north of San Fran­cisco. I’ll post on the gar­den des­ti­na­tions I man­aged to drag peo­ple to while we were up there, but I’ll start back­wards with one of the events on the way home yesterday.

On the return trip the car was plagued for a few min­utes by this fly that kept buzzing around the inside of the car, evad­ing all our attempts to shoo it out the win­dows. In the back seat we had three plants that were my sou­venirs from a visit to Cal­i­for­nia Car­ni­vores, a car­niv­o­rous plant spe­cialty nurs­ery that was just five min­utes form the hotel where we stayed. (I’ll post more on the nurs­ery visit later.)

One of the plants was this sun­dew, Drosera fil­i­formis ssp. fil­i­formis ‘Florida Giant.’ Well, I think you know where this story is headed…

When we got home John noticed that a fly had been trapped by the sun­dew, most likely the one that had been annoy­ing us at the begin­ning of the trip. That explains why we hadn’t noticed the insect after the first few min­utes of the return trip.

After this expe­ri­ence I’d like to sug­gest that every auto­mo­tive man­u­fac­turer should make a drosera stan­dard equip­ment on all their mod­els, espe­cially for this buggy time of the year…

August 10 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: carnivorous plants • Drosera filiformis • sundews | 6 Comments »

feed your guests before you eat them

Yes­ter­day saw some of my pitcher plants open­ing up their spring­time blooms. These are car­niv­o­rous plants that pri­mar­ily dine on insects that slide into leaves which have evolved into ele­gant long tubes that con­tain a diges­tive juice at the bot­tom. (See the young Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla ‘Tarnok’ pitch­ers in the pic­ture to the left.)

Almost all the species have evolved so that they flower, offer­ing nec­tar to their guests, before they develop their mature pitchers–effectively help­ing assure their repro­duc­tion by not din­ing on their pol­li­na­tors. These soft yel­low flow­ers appear on Sar­race­nia alata, the pale or yel­low trumpet.

Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla ‘Giant’ looks like it’s only a cou­ple days behind in its flow­er­ing sched­ule. This bud is about to open to a dark red lit­tle mop of petals.

In the “eat-or-be-eaten” world of car­niv­o­rous plants, it’s inter­est­ing to see that it’s not the plants that always have the upper hand in their rela­tion­ship with insects. Here the top of an emerg­ing pitcher has been munched on by some insect.

This was my first pitcher plant, pur­chased in the flower aisle of the local Trader Joe’s store. (It must have been a spe­cial pur­chase because I’ve never seen them there again…) Like many plants sold for dec­o­ra­tion, it came with no label. I want to know the name of every­thing, so this both­ers me to no end. (It could be the com­mon dec­o­ra­tive hybrid Sar­race­nia Judith Hin­dle, or it might not…)

I’m still fairly new to pitcher plants, so I can’t offer much advice on grow­ing them other than to keep them wet, and to use good-quality water. These are about as far from drought-tolerant plants as you’ll ever encounter. And to that I might add that when given an option to select between pot­ting them in half-peat/half-sand or half-peat/half-perlite, choose the sand mix­ture, at least if you’re doing a lit­tle bog plant­ing. Oth­er­wise the per­lite just floats to the top, look­ing like lit­tle sty­ro­foam peanuts that have floated to the sur­face of a pol­luted lake. Not pretty. If I were ever to re-do the bog, that would be the first thing I’d do differently.

April 13 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: carnivorous plants • Sarracenia alata • Sarracenia leucophylla | 1 Comment »