[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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 »

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 »

souvenirs

I’m back from my trip, and I’ll post some of the trip pic­tures here soon.

Two weeks away dur­ing prime grow­ing sea­son can guar­an­tee that you’ll come back to sur­prises. I knew toma­toes grew quickly, but, dang, what was I think­ing when I put that one inde­ter­mi­nate mon­ster in the flower bed? I don’t usu­ally prune my tomato plants, but that’s what I was doing within fif­teen min­utes of pulling up in the dri­ve­way. A few baby toma­toes of the first crop went with the stems that went into the greens recy­cle bin, but there will be more where those came from.

The nicest sur­prise to come back to was prob­a­bly the open­ing of the first pitcher on the Sar­race­nia alata in the new bog gar­den. I’d been watch­ing the new leaves mak­ing their way up from the rhi­zomes for the last cou­ple of months, and this first pitcher was per­fect: ele­gant, stream­lined, and gen­tly striped.

I usu­ally don’t buy piles of sou­venirs on my trips. This time I came home with three. One was a lit­tle soap in the shape of a cute griz­zly bear. (The soap smelled like cheap cologne.) Another was a wild huckleberry-filled choco­late bar for John. (Even though he likes choco­late as much as I do, he agreed that the sou­venir bar tasted like bad Hershey’s with a lit­tle bit of berry jam spread on it. At least the wrap­per was festive.)

And the last sou­venir I brought home was for the car­niv­o­rous plants in the bog gar­den. Com­mon wis­dom is that car­ni­vores like pure water, with total dis­solved solids less than 50 parts per mil­lion. The local San Diego water bot­toms out at around 180ppm tds and goes up from there, so it’s not ideal–and actu­ally lethal over the long term–for car­ni­vores. At the Nor­ris Camp­ground in Yel­low­stone on my way out I emp­tied my 5-gallon emer­gency water con­tainer which I’d filled with dis­gust­ing San Diego tap water at the start of the trip. Then I went to the spigot and filled it with five fresh gal­lons of pure moun­tain snowmelt.

Not long after I got home I took the moun­tain water to the bog plants and opened the spigot on the jug and let it drib­ble into the assorted pitcher plants and sun­dews. After sniff­ing the dis­gust­ing sou­venir soap and sam­pling the unfor­tu­nate choco­late, I know the bog plants got the best sou­venir of all from my trip. Noth­ing is too good for some of my cur­rent favorite plants…

A happy Cape sun­dew (Drosera capen­sis, broad leaf form) in the bog garden.

June 06 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: bog garden • pitcher plants • Sarracenia alata • souvenirs | 3 Comments »