[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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: sarracenia • seedlings • stratification • The Pitcher Plant Project | 8 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 »

the experiment begins

The pointleaf man­zanita seeds I ordered ended up being from one of the many plant species (not only man­zan­i­tas) that depend on fire to per­pet­u­ate their species. In nature, a brisk fire might wipe out many of the exist­ing plants, but the fire also cre­ates an oppor­tu­nity for the seed­bank to come to life. With­out the nec­es­sary fire, the seeds just lie on the ground–that’s if they don’t get eaten by critters.

The sub­jects in this exper­i­ment exhibit really really hard shells that pro­tect the embryo inside. Get­ting word from a hos­pitable out­side world to the swad­dled seed germ is the chal­lenge. The seed packet I received rec­om­mended soak­ing them in sul­fu­ric acid for six to fif­teen hours. That’s one way to break through the seed coat to get mois­ture and nutri­ents inside.

Doing research on sim­i­lar man­zan­i­tas, some sites rec­om­mended scratch­ing the seed coat, mak­ing sure not to dam­age the germ inside. Some papers rec­om­mended build­ing a four-inch pile of com­bustibles above the seeds and set­ting the pile on fire. And yet another rec­om­men­da­tion was to boil the seeds for fif­teen to thirty sec­onds (one source) or one to two min­utes (another source).

No mat­ter which of the above meth­ods was tried, the seeds also required cold-stratification to con­vince them that they had endured a near-freezing win­ter and could begin growth. Which seed-torture method to try was the question.

Sul­fu­ric acid: Where can a non-chemist get it eas­ily? And it sounded a tad dangerous.

Scratch­ing the seed coat (some­times called scar­i­fi­ca­tion): Tedious for more than a cou­ple seeds, and how could I be sure I didn’t scratch off too much? Or not enough?

Build­ing a fire over the seeds? This method also sounded dan­ger­ous, but poten­tially fun.

Boil­ing the seeds (a vari­ant on scar­i­fy­ing seeds): Sounded safer than acid or fire, but do you go for fif­teen sec­onds or two min­utes? Wouldn’t too long kill off the lit­tle embryos?

I think that tem­pera­men­tally I’m part mad sci­en­tist. I thought an exper­i­ment to test out all the rec­om­mended meth­ods might be instructive–and at least a lit­tle entertaining.

I found some weak sul­fu­ric acid in a lit­tle squeeze bot­tle at a pool sup­ply store. At a con­cen­tra­tion of less than 1%, it was meant for test­ing water, not for play­ing with the acid bal­ance. Pretty weak excuse for acid, but worth a try. I soaked some seeds for 18 hours overnight, adding a lit­tle time to the end because the stuff was so dilute. (A day after doing this I encoun­tered an old bot­tle of drain cleaner in the garage, some­thing labeled sul­fu­ric acid. I’ll try another soak with the real stuff later on.)

The next method was to scratch the seed coat. I used a steel file to break the seed coat and a pair of pli­ers to hold the seed. I scraped vary­ing amounts off the seed coat, from a mod­er­ate amount to a fairly aggres­sive amount. This was hard, slow, del­i­cate work–way more dif­fi­cult than I thought it would be.

I said ear­lier that build­ing a lit­tle fire might be fun. It was, though I smelled like smoke for hours after­ward. The flames burned brightly with the aid of a fire­place lighter, then the embers hung around for a good ten more min­utes or more.

Some­how this approach seemed to make the most sense to me. If the plants rely on heat, this solu­tion would pro­vide it. If they rely instead on some secret ingre­di­ent that emanates from burnt wood, this method would give them that. And if the burn­ing helps break through the hard seed coat, this method could do that, too.

It goes with­out say­ing: You need to use a non-flammable pot to do this!

And my last method was boil­ing the seeds. I brought water to a boil, threw in a few seeds, and picked a forty-five sec­ond time period to leave them on the heat. The boil­ing seemed to soften the seed coat­ing, and I tried to pull off what I could.

No proper sci­en­tific exper­i­ment is com­plete with­out a con­trol group, so there were some addi­tional seeds that I tor­tured in no way. I was run­ning out of seeds pretty quickly.

Each of the groups of seed were then pot­ted up, labeled, watered, cov­ered with a bag, and then put in the low veg­gie drawer next to where I store the film for my cam­eras. Now I keep them moist–not wet–and wait for two months. At the end of Novem­ber I’ll take the pots out and move them to my unheated green­house or maybe a warm win­dowsill, for tem­per­a­tures higher than in the fridge. After their var­i­ous tor­tures and a proper period of strat­i­fy­ing, maybe I’ll be crowded with so many man­zan­i­tas that I can give them away to every­one I know in the spring. Or not.

I’ll post the progress as I go along…

October 01 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Arctostaphylos pungens • fire ecology • germination • Mexican manzanita • pointleaf manzanita • scarification • seeds • stratification | 3 Comments »