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: • • • • • • • • | 8 Comments »

the big project

It’s done at last, the project from Hades.

The ugly back­side of the out­door fire­place, a week into the demolition

What started out as this ugly out­door fire­place with attached bench…

The fin­ished bench, from the end.

…has now mor­phed effort­lessly (yah right) into this new gar­den fea­ture: part bench, part deck, part raised bog/planter. It’s about four by six­teen feet in size.

For the last two years my bog plants were hog­ging up the sunny spot in the mid­dle of the patio. Totally in the way. The new bench needed to have a raised bog/planter detail, return­ing some of the hard­scape to garden.

With a gen­eral plan in place we got going.

 

Some scenes from the project:

This act of cre­ation began with an act of destruc­tion. The decrepit and not earthquake-safe chim­ney came down a brick at a time over sev­eral week­ends. We saved 350 bricks that came off in pretty good con­di­tion and hand-chiseled the mor­tar off of most of them. Inside the fire­place was the rea­son the whole thing hadn’t col­lapsed already: 200 pounds of rein­forc­ing steel. At cur­rent metal recy­cling rates we got almost 30 dol­lars for the scrap metal.

The rus­tic Japan­ese tiles that I loved 15 years ago and still appre­ci­ate now

I had some moments of nos­tal­gia and renewed appre­ci­a­tion for the lit­tle Japan­ese tiles that I picked out fif­teen years ago to try to orna­ment what at the time was already a mar­gin­ally attrac­tive gar­den fea­ture. The didn’t come off the fire­place eas­ily, and the shards and even the good bits were dis­patched to the dump. As much as we tried to recy­cle, this project is not going to get a Plat­inum LEED rat­ing.

The super-story bricks removed, we were left with a long con­crete bench. I like plain con­crete as a mate­r­ial, but this bench had been formed around a wood fence that had rot­ted away a decade ago. We shimmed over the ugli­ness and cov­ered it all with wood.

A shimmed cor­ner with sup­port for the deck­ing about to be installed

The whole bench with shims in place


 

The bench with black paint to keep the white from show­ing through between the slats

Before adding sup­pot bat­tens for the planter we checked to see how it would look with them out­side. Ugh. Way too rus­tic, too Coun­try Home, too NASCAR. The bat­tens are now hid­den inside.


 

With the fire­place gone, it opens up the patio to the rest of the back yard.I liked how the zones were dis­tinct before, but the bench still serves as a gen­tle sep­a­ra­tor between gar­den zones.


 

The bench was poured with this Greco-Roman col­umn for sup­port. Were they pin­ing for some lost ances­tors? Or were they post­mod­ern ten years before the move­ment caught on with archi­tects? What­ever the case, we decided to paint it black to de-emphasize it. No way were we going to take on tak­ing it out!

The planter nearly com­plete, ready for the pond liner

Pond liner being put into place. This is to pro­tect the wood and allow the bog plants to sit in water. This could also be repur­posed in the future as a raised pond, or–after punch­ing some drain holes–a nor­mal planter box.

…and here it is with the bog plants in place.


A final “after” picture:

We’re going to relax some before start­ing the next gar­den project, maybe in these two old but­ter­fly chairs John got second-hand 30 years ago, with our feet up on the new bench…

July 09 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • • • • | 10 Comments »

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: • • • • • | 7 Comments »

a garden sewing project

Last year a vis­i­tor to the gar­den was ask­ing about the lit­tle bags that were on some of the flow­ers. It looked like it was time to explain the birds and the bees to the curi­ous visitor.

That was Year One of my mak­ing some hybrids using Sar­race­nia, one of the two North Amer­i­can car­niv­o­rous pitcher plant gen­era. Most of the plants live out­doors and get vis­ited by var­i­ous insects. The lit­tle bags were con­doms against larger insects get­ting to the flower and deliv­er­ing pollen from a dif­fer­ent flower than I’d intended to be used in a hybrid. In the South, where most of these plants orig­i­nate, the flow­ers are pol­li­nated by a large bee that isn’t found here in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. But I looked at the layer of pro­tec­tion as insur­ance against some other insect get­ting to the flower and doing its own exper­i­ments with plant breed­ing. I wanted these flow­ers all to myself.

When I was shop­ping at the fab­ric store I was a lit­tle dis­tressed to find that the mesh fab­ric I was inter­ested in was labeled “pet­ti­coat liner.” I thought I was a fairly open-minded and lib­er­ated male, but I felt a lit­tle shy going up to the counter with a bolt of the stuff, sort of like the first time you go up to the phar­macy counter with a box of condoms.

The clerk sensed my dis­com­fort and sup­por­t­ively asked what I was going to do with the fab­ric. I explained. “Inter­est­ing idea,” she said. “I use big pieces of it to cover up my fruit trees to keep the birds out.” Oh good. A fel­low gar­dener. This per­son under­stands. I left the store feel­ing much less stressed.

These bags aren’t the most vir­tu­osic sewing projects you’ll encounter, just a long rec­tan­gle of fab­ric that’s been hand sewn up the sides to make a long tube. I use paper­clips to hold the sheaths in place, but with a lit­tle more effort you can sew in some rib­bon or string to make some­thing resem­bling gift pouches that you can open and close easily.

It’s good to make at least a cou­ple dif­fer­ent sizes to accom­mo­date the dif­fer­ent bloom sizes found in this genus. This sea­son I ran out of larger bags and ended using an actual gift bag left over from the hol­i­days. Its white-gold color stands out pretty emphat­i­cally in the gar­den. If you were start­ing from scratch, a darker color would recede into the gar­den more gracefully.

These bags don’t pro­vide pro­tec­tion against smaller pol­li­na­tors. After doing a lit­tle more research it appears that the gold stan­dard for mate­r­ial for hybridiz­ing bags seems to be reemay, the breath­able spun poly­ester that’s used for float­ing row cov­ers in the gar­den. Sci­en­tific papers fre­quently cite Reemay bags being used in con­trolled pol­li­na­tion sit­u­a­tions. That stuff is bright white and really stands out in the gar­den. For­tu­nately these bags only need to be on Sar­race­nia flow­ers for two to three weeks, so you won’t be defac­ing your gar­den per­ma­nently. Still, while your plants are wear­ing them, you might have to do a lit­tle more explain­ing to peo­ple vis­it­ing your plant collection…

April 02 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • | 8 Comments »

thank you rob!

Before the hol­i­days got in full swing I got some pitcher plant seed and seedlings from Rob of The Pitcher Plant Project. Rob is super-enthusiastic about the genus Sar­race­nia and his blog bounces along with his energy. Check it out!

Rob’s a cou­ple years ahead of me in mak­ing his own cus­tom hybrids and has some really cool plants com­ing along. Here are some shots of the seedlings he sent me.


These first all come from the cross of Sar­race­nia Bug Bat x Diane Whit­taker. This cross com­bines the seri­ously snakey-looking hood of S. minor with the frilly hood and wild pat­tern­ing of S. leu­co­phylla. The plants are young, but you can begin to see what promise they have. You can also see some of the vari­a­tion that’s pos­si­ble in a com­plex hybrid.

Two views of a seedling from the com­plex cross of Sar­race­nia ((pur­purea ssp. pupurea x jone­sii) x (leu­co­phylla x rubra ssp. gulfen­sis)). All four par­ents of this hybrid share a rare reces­sive genetic muta­tion that pre­vents the leaves from pro­duc­ing red pig­ments, leav­ing this hybrid green green green from chloro­phyll. One of Rob’s spe­cial inter­ests is in these so-called “anthocyanin-free” (“AF”) plants, and I think they’re pretty amaz­ing too. It really focuses your atten­tion on the archi­tec­ture of the pitchers.

Even if you’re only mod­er­ately technically-oriented you can make a lot of sense out of what’s going on with these AF plants in a paper by Phil Sheri­dan and Richard Mills, first pub­lished in Plant Sci­ence and now avail­able online at Mead­owview Bio­log­i­cal Research Sta­tion: [ Pres­ence of proan­tho­cyani­dins in mutant green Sar­race­nia indi­cate block­age in late antho­cyanin biosyn­the­sis between leu­co­cyani­din and pseudobase ]. Accord­ing to the paper the muta­tion that makes these plants green is one that affects the final stage in the meta­bolic path­way that cre­ates red antho­cyanin pigments.

And the plants kept going… Here are some first-year seedlings of the cross of Sar­race­nia Godzuki x ((flava x oreophila) x flava var. rugelli)…

And finally a big pile of seed from some really inter­est­ing crosses:

  • S. oreophila “Veined” x Adrian Slack
  • S. (oreophila x Royal Ruby) x Adrian Slack
  • S. leu­co­phylla x Adrian Slack
  • S. (leu­co­phylla x oreophila) x Brooks Hybrid
  • S. (leu­co­phylla x oreophila) x (Ladies in Wait­ing x Judith Hindle)
  • S. Bug Scoop x Brooks Hybrid
  • S. alata, Texas x flava var. maxima

They’re now in indi­vid­ual bags of damp sphag­num moss in the lower veg­gie crisper of the fridge. A cou­ple more weeks of the cold treat­ment and then they’ll be ready to pot up.

If I man­age to keep all the plants and even half of the new seedlings I ger­mi­nate alive I’ll be up to my ankles in hun­gry young car­ni­vores. To some peo­ple this might sound like a 1950s B hor­ror movie, but as far as I’m con­cerned life doesn’t get much bet­ter than that!

Thanks, Rob!

December 28 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: • • • | 8 Comments »

more december colors

Red and green seem to be the pre­dom­i­nant col­ors these days. Instead, how about a shot of hot magenta-pink against green? Of all my pitcher plants this sea­son Sar­race­nia Daina’s Delight is prob­a­bly look­ing the best of any of them.

Vivid col­ors aren’t the rule this late in the sea­son, with brown being the increas­ingly preva­lent shade. With fewer things like color to dis­tract you it’s a good time of year to con­cen­trate on the amaz­ing shapes these pitch­ers assume. In their brown state it’s eas­ier to see the lit­tle hairs on the leaves that direct the insects down into diges­tive juices.


For you color addicts there’s still a bit of color left. This species is Sar­race­nia rubra var. wher­ryi (a.k.a. S. alaba­men­sis var. wher­ryi.)

And for you color addicts who like a more tra­di­tional red and green combo, could you do any bet­ter than this? It’s a cross nick­named ‘W.C.’ by Jerry Adding­ton after Karen Oudean’s Wil­low Creek Nurs­ery, in honor of Karen bestow­ing on him this clone of the hybrid of S. (psittacina x rubra) x leu­co­phylla.

Hmmm…how about a cross between Daina’s Delight and W.C. for gor­geous late sea­son color and awe­some pat­tern­ing? If they both bloom next spring I just might have to make that cross and find out…

December 23 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • • | 6 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.

A ripe Sarracenia flava seed pod, picked mid-November.

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: • • • • • • | 14 Comments »

colder than alaska

It’s been a cool sum­mer so far, fol­low­ing on the heels of a sunny but cool spring. I’ve been watch­ing the tem­per­a­tures in the paper for Fair­banks, Alaska, and most days the offi­cial San Diego report has been cooler. In fact it’s been cooler than almost any­where in the US except for maybe Anchor­age in Alaska. Brr.

At my July 4th party I was talk­ing to some­one there with ties to the Scripps Insti­tu­tion of Oceanog­ra­phy, and his thoughts were that this is typ­i­cal for an El Niño year. The phe­nom­e­non that the locals call “May gray” would be slow to get started (as was the case this year), and the dreaded sub­se­quent phe­nom­e­non the we call “June gloom” would drag on longer than usual. All that seems to be happening.

The gar­den natives don’t seem to be wor­ry­ing about the tem­per­a­ture as much as I’ve been. In fact the late-spring bloomers seem to be hav­ing a field day, extend­ing their bloom, look­ing nice at a time of year when they don’t always. Black sage is often done by this time, but there are a few lin­ger­ing flow­er­ing stems.

For stun­ning flow­ers, though, the black sage has passed the baton to Cleve­land sage. Here’s the com­mon and gor­geous cul­ti­var ‘Win­nifred Gilman.’

…and here’s Win­nifred in closeup…

One of local live-forevers, Dud­leya edulis, has had one of the more amaz­ing years that I can remem­ber. Here’s an 18–20 year old plant from above, all cov­ered with flow­ers. In this photo it’s sprawl­ing six feet across from one edge to the other.

The same dud­leya, viewed from ground level as it cas­cades over a short lit­tle retain­ing wall.

The San Miguel Island buck­wheat that I grew from seed two years ago, Eri­o­gonum grande var. rubescens, is finally hit­ting its stride, finally look­ing the pho­tos I’ve seen in books. Maybe the cooler weather will keep it look­ing nice longer.

Among the many non-natives that call my gar­den their home, this is Clero­den­drum ugan­dense, finally perk­ing up after look­ing like a twig until late in May. I think it’s been a some­what slow start for this plant this year, but it always waits until the weather warms to look like a plant you want to keep in the garden.

The com­mon orna­men­tal sage, Salvia ‘Hot Lips,’ is grown for its red and white bicol­ored blooms. I’ve heard that it blooms mostly with white flow­ers when weather turns cold. In the left photo these are the only two red and white flow­ers I could find on three plants. The rest of the flow­ers are white. In the depths of win­ter, how­ever, this plant is often com­pletely bicol­ored, so I’m not sure if there’s any truth to this color change rumor.

Some of the plants that I worry about the most are my Amer­i­can pitcher plants, these Sar­race­nia from the South, where the daily low tem­per­a­tures these days are often run­ning ten degrees above the San Diego day­time highs. For­tu­nately these plants seem to respond more to daylength than to tem­per­a­ture, and the plants look pretty good. Still, they might be taller by now where they originate.

Cool as the days may be, one thing told me for sure that I do not live remotely near Alaska. Mon­day night was the grand open­ing of the first giant bloom of this climb­ing cac­tus, prob­a­bly Hylo­cereus unda­tus. Even if it’s prob­a­bly been slow get­ting started this year, it’s prob­a­bly the best proof that I’m over­re­act­ing. Hardy to not much below freez­ing, one hit of arc­tic cold and you’ll freeze this plant’s tuchas off.

At eight to ten inches across, the only shy thing about this plant is that it only opens as dark­ness approaches. Peo­ple in cold climes covet being able to grow plants like this–or in fact many of our more ten­der Cal­i­for­nia natives.

That’s def­i­nite proof, Dorothy. We don’t live in Alaska. It just might feel that way these cool sum­mer days.

July 07 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • • • • • • • | 13 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: • • • | 13 Comments »

bog chronicles

Sev­eral ponds and a water­fall came with the house when we moved in a cou­ple decades ago. They looked cool and the water­fall con­tin­ues to pro­vide a nice gur­gling noise that helps mask the usual din of a res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hood. Unfor­tu­nately, as the years passed, the ponds began to fail or show their shortcomings.

One of them was so tiny it was good for breed­ing mos­qui­tos and not much else. It got turned into a planter pretty quickly.

The mid-sized pond turned out to be a crit­ter mag­net. Rum­mag­ing pos­sums and rac­coons ate all the fish and reg­u­larly upturned any water plants. Two years back it became my first bog gar­den, and is today filled with car­niv­o­rous sun­dews and pitcher plants. I was con­cerned about how much water a bog gar­den would require, but last year I fig­ured it out that it required only about as much water as an equiv­a­lent patch of grass.

Maybe five years ago it became appar­ent that we had a grow­ing leak on the largest pair of ponds and link­ing water­fall. The con­crete that made up the ponds was fine, but plant roots were pry­ing up the dec­o­ra­tive rocks that had been mortared on top to make the ponds look like a vol­canic grotto. I divided the upper pond in two, leav­ing the front half to cas­cade the water into the lower pond. The back half became yet another planter. Noth­ing seemed to do well there, though, so I decided to try turn­ing it into another bog for my grow­ing pitcher plant collection.

I started by remov­ing sev­eral hun­dred pounds of dirt. Tak­ing away the dirt exposed the rea­son why noth­ing seemed to thrive in the bed. The sur­round plants had sent their roots into the planter and sucked up what­ever irri­ga­tion I pro­vided to the plants I wanted to thrive there. I did a bru­tal prun­ing on all the adven­tur­ing roots, but fig­ured that they’d be back when offered moist soil to wan­der into.

To keep roots out of the bog I decided to con­tainer­ized the bog plants in plas­tic stor­age tubs from Tar­get. I could water the plants in the tubs and leave the sur­round­ing soil dry, reduc­ing the attrac­tion for maraud­ing roots. I used two six­teen by twenty-two inch con­tain­ers that were a foot deep plus a smaller one on the end.

The super-secret ingre­di­ents that went into my bog mix: sand and peat­moss. You need to be sure the peat­moss doesn’t have added fer­til­izer, which could make the bog plants fail.


I packed dirt around the tubs to sta­bi­lize them, then filled them up with a 60/40 blend of sphag­num peat moss and washed plas­ter sand, the sort of acid, low-nutrition soil that most car­ni­vores pre­fer to grow in. Finally, after sev­eral hours of hard labor of the sort the sort that I think my doc­tor is about to tell me I can’t do any­more, I got to install the plants.

The bog, ready for plants.

One of the Sar­race­nia alata rhi­zomes that went into the bog.

I selected sev­eral species of taller-growing pitcher plants to form the main plant­ing, Sar­race­nia flava, S. alata and S. oreophila. From my research I fig­ured out that these often grow nat­u­rally far­ther from water sources or in areas where the bogs dry out for part of the year. As far as pitcher plants go, these all should prove to be fairly drought tol­er­ant. Still “drought tol­er­ant” is a rel­a­tive term, and they’ll need to be kept at least damp year-round.

Ta-da! The fin­ished bog.


To fin­ish off the plant­ing, and to par­tially assuage my guilt at not using native plants, I sur­rounded one of the tubs with divi­sions of one of my native rushes, Jun­cus patens, a ripar­ian plant that doesn’t seem to resent dry­ing out. Another bonus of this species is that it looks good through­out the year, some­thing that can’t be said for these pitcher plants, which counter their sev­eral months of look­ing severely cool and amaz­ing with sev­eral months of look­ing dying and pathetic.

I’ll post progress pho­tos as the young new bog plants begin to fill and and show their poten­tial. I’m hop­ing this won’t turn into another failed pond.

March 17 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • | 6 Comments »

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