Saturday, January 3, 2015

The long awaited, MEGA Sarracenia garden photo update – Part 3

Here is the final instalment in the mega photo update of my Sarracenia gardens!

Part 1 dealt with the last of the potted plants and the hybrid garden.

Part 2 dealt with the flava var. atropurpurea / rubricorpora / redder forms of cuprea / red VFT garden.

This post – part 3 – deals with the final garden, which as it turns out has every variety of S. flava except the antho free one growing in it. Be warned, this is a photo-intensive post and will take some time to load up.

Sarracenia flava garden

The long awaited, MEGA Sarracenia garden photo update – Part 2

This post covers the Sarra garden containing the so-called red forms of Sarracenia flava.

Part 1 of this post covers the potted Sarracenia and the hybrid Sarracenia garden. You can see this post by clicking here.

Part 3 covers the third garden that contains all flava forms except the antho free one.

The red Sarracenia flava garden

The long awaited, MEGA Sarracenia garden photo update – Part 1

Now the silly season is drawing to a close, I finally (!) got a chance to do justice in photographing the Sarracenia gardens and their inhabitants. This is pretty much an exhaustive look at what I am growing right now.

A warning up front, this is a photo intensive entry and will take a long time to load.

Make sure you also see Part 2 (the red flava varieties) and Part 3 (all flava varieties); this post covers the potted Sarracenia and the hybrid garden only.

Sarracenia gardens, 3 January 2014

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Happy New Year!

Here’s wishing everyone a very happy and successful 2015. I took advantage of an opportunity to shoot up to my parent’s place in Queensland and visited a few places of CP interest that I thought I would share.

Panorama of heathland, Mooloolah River N.P., Queensland, Australia

The above panorama is of the heathland in the Mooloolah River National Park on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. This area is where I saw my first wild carnivorous plants: Drosera spathulata var. gympiensis. I will always be grateful to my father for showing them to me, as it opened up my interest in carnivorous plants – they were no longer things found only in books or fragile exotics for sale at our local nursery. They were wild plants growing a few minutes drive from our house.

Drosera spathulata var. gympiensis

Drosera spathulata var. gympiensis

Above are a few plants of D. spathulata var. gympiensis from this locality. Individuals can vary tremendously within each population I have seen of this taxon, and here they can range from tiny flowering plants close to the size of D. pygmaea right up to giants over 8 cm across. These are middle of the road plants, perhaps 3-4 cm across, growing in light shade under a canopy of Melaleuca quinquinerva. Plants in full sun become bright burgundy red. Sadly, a lot of other sites I enjoyed visiting as a teenager are now extirpated because of changed hydrology and/or soil chemistry.

Nepenthes alata var. boschiana

And to close for the night – here is one of the Nepenthes my parents grow outdoors year round in hanging baskets in their Buderim garden. This is Nepenthes alata var. boschiana. Mum fell in love with this clone when we visited Geoff Mansell of Exotica Plants back in 1999, and we have grown it ever since. This one is happily growing up a Callistemon. There are also Nepenthes ventricosa, N. truncata, N. x allardii (= maxima x veitchii) and what is supposed to be N. thorelli in the garden, but none are quite as beautiful as this plant is.

Stay tuned – the photos I promised of my Saracenia gardens are due shortly!