[ Lost in the Landscape ]

diversity

In the last post I men­tioned that I was mak­ing hybrids with some of my pitcher plants. The process is a lit­tle klunky, and it typ­i­cally takes a min­i­mum of three years for plants to approach matu­rity. So why bother?

Here’s why I bother. Below are sib­lings from a sin­gle cross made by Rob of The Sar­race­nia Project blog, some plants of which he sent me a few months ago. It’s one cross, but just look at all the subtle–or not so subtle–variations from one plant to another. Traits from one par­ent com­bine with traits from the other. Some­times one par­ent dom­i­nates, some­times you see a per­fect fusion of the two. Although the plants aren’t yet mature, they’re start­ing to show the char­ac­ter­is­tics they’ll carry on to adult-hood.

The par­ents are Sar­race­nia Bug Bat–photos of which you can view [ here ] at the really swell Car­niv­o­rous Plant Photo Finder site–and S. Diane Whit­taker, view­able [ here ]. This is a com­plex cross, but the species that push their pres­ence for­ward most are the extrav­a­gant S. leu­co­phylla [ pho­tos here ] and the stern and slightly sin­is­ter S. minor [ pho­tos here ].

I don’t know about you, but I like to just stare at the plants and observe how the fam­ily traits express them­selves. Addi­tion­ally, most hybrids look dif­fer­ent as the sea­sons change. Right now the final three are my favorites, but I’m look­ing for­ward to how these plant will develop though the sum­mer and fall. Thanks for the hours of fun, Rob!

April 04 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: breeding plants • hybrids • Rob Co • Sarrace Bug Bat x Dianne Whittaker • sarracenia • The Sarracenia Project | 7 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 »

fun with hybrids

There are over a quar­ter mil­lion plant species known to biol­ogy. Of those more than 5,000 can be found in Cal­i­for­nia, and 1,500 in San Diego County alone. With so many amaz­ing plant species out there I still find myself being inter­est­ing in hybrids between the pure species.

My last post was on Sar­race­nia, the North Amer­i­can pitcher plants. The genus appears to be fairly new to the world in evo­lu­tion­ary terms, and all the species in the genus will hybridize eas­ily with any of the oth­ers. And all these hybrids will con­tinue to inter­breed with the par­ent species or other hybrids. When you find a bog with two or more species in it, chances are good that you’ll find inter­me­di­ate plants with traits of all the species present in that location.

This dri­ves biol­o­gists crazy. Find­ing a plant that’s a pure species can be a major headache when the plants are out there, frol­ick­ing in the mud. But evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy acknowl­edges that hybrids can intro­duce new genes into a plant’s gene pool so that they might be bet­ter equipped to with­stand some stres­sors that a pure species might not.

In addi­tion to pos­si­ble evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tages, a hybrid plant found in nature can be a really cool-looking mon­grel. And human-created hybrids that have been selected for spe­cific traits over gen­er­a­tions can begin to take a species or genus in direc­tions nature would never have imagined.

Here on the left is the Sar­race­nia hybrid Judith Hin­dle. I first encoun­tered mass tissue-cultured num­bers of it in the flower aisle at Trader Joe’s a cou­ple years ago. It’s a pretty great-looking plant by itself, but imag­ine a whole store dis­play of it. This human cre­ated selec­tion derives from three species, and its pedi­gree can be notated: ((Sar­race­nia pur­purea x S. flava) x S. leu­co­phylla) x ((S. pur­purea x S. flava) x S. leu­co­phylla).

Doing the math, you an see that it’s one-fourth S. pur­purea, this species. (My photo here isn’t the exact par­ent, just one gen­eral exam­ple of what this vari­able species can look like. Sev­eral tax­on­o­mists have decided that this plant I’ve shown you, S. pur­purea var. burkii, is actu­ally a new species, S. rosea, but it looks quite sim­i­lar and you can get the gen­eral idea…)

Another quar­ter of the ances­try comes from S. flava. (You might rec­og­nize this same photo from my last post. Once again this is just a rough esti­ma­tion of what the par­ent looked like. It’s actual great-grandparents were S. flava var. rugelli, a plant with pure green pitch­ers with a red patch in the throat.)

And the final two quar­ters of its ances­try comes from the gor­geous S. leu­co­phylla, the white-topped pitcher plant. I find myself com­par­ing the hybrid with the par­ents, try­ing to see the char­ac­ter­is­tics that came through in the final hybrid. Clearly S. leu­co­phylla has the most influ­ence in this cross.

Here’s another com­mon sar­race­nia, S. Dixie Lace. Larry Mel­lichamp, its breeder, isn’t 100% cer­tain of its parent­age, but he esti­mates it to be: (S. leu­co­phylla x S. rubra) x (S. psittacina x S. pur­purea). It shares two par­ents with Judith Hin­dle above, but intro­duces two new species into the mix.

The pres­ence of this ances­tor, S. rubra, is sub­tle, and is prob­a­bly most man­i­fested in the some­what upright-growing pitch­ers and the robust growth habit. (Once again, the plant I’ve shown is only a close approx­i­ma­tion of the S. rubra var. wher­ryi that was used for the actual cross. And yet again, this lat­ter species has been clas­si­fied as a sep­a­rate species by some taxonomists.)

The final ances­tor is S. psittacina, a plant that’s prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble to hide the pres­ence of in any hybrid. The lean­ing growth habit and pat­tern­ing of the pitch­ers takes sev­eral gen­er­a­tions to fade into the background.

Hybrids can hap­pen any­where. In the irri­gated part of my gar­den I have a few sage species from Europe and the Amer­i­cas. These are the leaves of Salvia sagit­tata, the arrow-leaved sage, a plant from Ecuador.

Next to it I noticed a young plant which at first I thought was a seedling of the of its neigh­bor. It has the same light green col­oration and coarse leaf tex­ture as does S. sagit­tata. When I started look­ing closer at the leaves, how­ever, some­thing seemed a lit­tle off. Instead of the dis­tinct arrow shape, the leaves are closer to oval. Seedlings some­times take a while to develop their mature char­ac­ter­is­tics, but I started think­ing that it might be a hybrid of S. sagit­tata with one of the other sages nearby.

Three feet away is S. nemorosa. It also has coarse-textured leaves, but they’re smaller, darker green and rounder (prob­a­bly “lin­ear” to “oblong” with a “cor­date” leaf base, accord­ing to the leaf mor­phol­ogy charts).

And about six feet away are sev­eral plants of the pop­u­lar ‘Hot Lips’ cul­ti­var of S. micro­phylla, a species from Texas into Mex­ico. Its leaves are smooth, much smaller, darker green and also more rounded. (I guess I’d call it an “ovate” leaf form with an “obtuse” leaf tip.)

Who do you think might be the father? I’m lean­ing towards S. nemorosa.

The seedling sage found a clear­ing in the mid­dle of a lit­tle walk­way to ger­mi­nate. I’ll let the seedling bloom to see if it’s interesting–or if it’s even a hybrid at all. See­ing the flow­ers should help me bet­ter guess what its par­ents might be. If it’s worth keep­ing I’ll trans­plant it out of harm’s way. If it’s not, I’ll treat it as any other unwanted gar­den col­o­nizer. What­ever the case, it’ll be an inter­est­ing lit­tle experiment.

Topic for a future post: What’s bad about hybrids?

October 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: hybrids • sages • Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' • Salvia nemorosa • Salvia sagittata • sarracenia • Sarracenia flava • Sarracenia leucophylla • Sarracenia psittacina • Sarracenia purpurea • Sarracenia rubra | 4 Comments »