[ 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 »

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 »

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 »