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: • • • | 13 Comments »