This is the view we woke up to this morning – snow in the Brindabella Ranges.
Here is a closer view:
This late snowfall is the best of the year – so strange it came in Springtime! We also got close to October’s average rainfall overnight, so the gardens (and outdoor Sarracenia) are happy. Here are some photos of where the greenhouse Sarracenia are up to:
The Sarracenia are shooting up their new leaves very rapidly now, with a few already open for business. Here is the same shot labelled to show which clone is which:
A yearly issue here is that the pitchers open well before their prey – mainly flies – appear. I usually supplement this lack of prey with a light dose of slow release fertiliser.
First plant open this year was this S. flava var. flava that many CP growers here have in their collections. Its venation fills in over the season and can become quite dense, but this plant seems to straddle that small difference between S. flava var. flava and S. flava var. ornata.
Two plants with more recently opened pitchers are these clones of S. flava var. cuprea; the left shows a plant I call “Victorian Clone”, as I received it from Ron Abernethy of the Victorian CP society. The one at right is “Gotcha! heavy veined”, which originated from a selfing of a heavy veined S. flava grown from seed supplied to Gotcha! by Allen Lowrie.
And just to finish off – here is a clone of D. binata var. multifida that likely originated from the Sydney region. It was sold by Living Traps as “Golden Giant”. This particular clone resembles the “T-form” type D. binata for the first few years, but eventually produces the multifida-type traps as it gets bigger. Another similar clone that I have in the collection came from Lithgow, and it also starts off its growth as a “T-form”. These plants can get very big indeed, and are spectacular to see growing on sheer cliffs in the escarpments of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.
