The Sarracenia flava collection in full bloom

The Sarracenia flava have hit their peak of flowers for this year, and they look spectacular! Here’s some blooms from assorted plants:

 

 

These photos are actually showing the collection past its peak (25 October), as some petals were already starting to fall. As luck would have it, I was away with work when the peak came (I suspect Tuesday was the actual peak).

 

As a small consolation, I managed to find nice populations of Drosera burmannii and Utricularia australis where I was near Newcastle, NSW. Incidentally, the plants of D. burmannii I brought from an AUSCPS member last year self-sowed enough seed that I should have a lovely carpet of them shortly in the VFT pot.

Speaking of which, the VFT collection has also done well and is emerging from dormancy. I’ve been busy nipping flower stalks off – I’ve never managed to get seed to set from my flytraps. Some Drosera pulchella gemmae I got off ebay Australia have also produced a goodly number of plants that are getting bigger, and each week I find a couple more between the flytraps. I’ll get the macro lens out and get some close-up shots of them soon.

 

Yesterday, I got in and pollinated as many S. flava flowers as I could. I selfed most things, but made a few strategic crosses. One was between two very nice S. flava var. cuprea clones, one from Gotcha! Plants and another from a local grower, Ross Rowe.

The other was a forward and reverse cross between S. flava var. atropurpurea from Blackwater State Forest, Florida (this is the first year that clone has flowered for me) and the atropurpurea clones FRT 1-1 and FRT 1-5. Here’s a photo of the Blackwater SF clone’s flower:

One thing that I haven’t seen before this year is the honeybees taking an interest in the flowers. They seem to be efficient pollinators, as they enter the flowers via the stigma and thoroughly dusted in pollen. The below bee is not so covered, as she is a little de-fuzzed (setulae rubbed from the scutum) and probably did not pick up any pollen from the stamens as a result. Hopefully, they haven’t messed up my crosses…

The first pitchers have opened too, with S. flava var. maxima from Honeysuckle Road, Harleyville, NC beating out a pot of S. flava var. atropurpurea by a few days.

More flowers open…

Shot from earlier this week – more flowers have opened since, with the peak coming in the next week. I’m already starting to play bumblebee and get some selfings and a few strategic crosses happening. The first pitchers will pop open soon – it looks like Sarracenia flava var. maxima clones from Honeysuckle Road, Harleyville, NC, will be the first to open.

The first flower of the 2018-2019 season

 

This year, the first flower belongs to a clone of Sarracenia flava var. rugellii that I picked up at Triffid Park some years ago. Its not the plant Triffid Park sell as ‘cut throat’ (that clone has never grown for me – it looks good in their nursery, but on the two times I’ve tried it, the plant doesn’t pitcher the following season), but one that I’ve not seen before or since in other collections. Apparently, Triffid Park regularly buys plants off growers in the VCPS, so it seems this clone is from one of those acquisitions. It differs by having an incredibly tight column on the pitcher, so I’ve always labelled it as ‘Triffid Park tight throat’. Here’s some photos of it in previous seasons:

 

I’m not sure if the veining at the base of the lid disqualifies it from being a rugellii though… but at any rate, its a beautiful plant and a strong grower.

Rise of the Sarracenia flowers, a second try at Drosera schizandra and the Nepenthes ampullaria terrarium

The Sarracenia are preparing for another beautiful show of flowers. I did a quick head count this morning – 263 buds emerged and rising – which makes for a bumper year. The first flower looks to be about two weeks out still. I’m thinking of getting the pollination brushes out and doing some crosses. To make it easy, the plan is to self everything. Fortunately, the leucophylla almost always open up after the flava are done, so the chance of interspecies hybridisation is low.

  

Last night was the October AUSCPS Canberra ground meeting, which had an emphasis on Pinguicula. I had an unexpected score – Dave Colburn from Sydney brought down some Drosera schizandra, a long-time favourite of mine and a plant I’ve only had the chance to try once. I currently have two coffee jar terrariums on my desk, getting indirect light through a north-facing window (southern hemisphere, so sun is to the north) and each growing a decent sized plant. Another AUSCPS member here grows D. schizandra to very large size, so I will have to take a look at his growing conditions.

On a sad note, the friend who accompanied me to try and find D. schizandra in the wild – Bob Miller – passed away a couple of months back. He was a very good friend who will be sorely missed.

Next to the D. schizandra is a large bowl holding a pot of D. adelae. The D. adeale are not especially happy (the spot they thrived last summer is not available at the moment) but that they are alive is still cause for celebration – I have lost D. adelae to the cold most years I’ve been in Canberra. Lack of light seems to be the problem (but I’m hoping this means there will be enough light to make D. schizandra happy). If it can hang in there a bit longer, it will get its old spot back and hopefully thrive again.

There is another terrarium in my office, and it contains one plant each of Nepenthes ampullaria ‘green’, N. ampullaria ‘red’ (not that it gets very red!) and N. x hookeriana. The plants are doing very well, but the light has consistently been burning their leaves (and has bleached out the Sphagnum!). That said, both the N. ampullaria have been producing ground rosette pitchers, some aerial rosettes and decent sized lower pitchers. The light I’ve been using is a 20W LED floodlight producing 2000 lumens, mounted 20 cm above the plants. I’m now thinking of trying either a 15W floodlight (but the local Bunnings are out of stock), a 24W compact fluoro (which has worked for me before) or two of the Ikea grow lamps. All of these options get me to about 1400-1600 lumens, which should help reduce leaf burn. The plants grow above a heated water bath, which produces if anything too much humidity (the pots are too wet and I don’t water them – I just top up the water bath). I might need to put down a coir basket liner under the pots to trap more of the humidity in the water bath while I’m messing with the lights.

Sarracenia in the wild at last - Sarracenia purpurea ssp. venosa at Suitland Bog Natural Area, Marylands.

This post fleshes out a talk I gave to the Canberra meeting of the Australasian Carnivorous Plant Society (AUSCPS) in August.

In June, I had my first ever visit to the east coast of the US (Washington, DC). Of course, I was determined to see Sarracenia. I was prepared to go to a lot of effort to find a site, but in five minutes of web sleuthing, I had my spot identified and travel plans made – the Suitland Bog Natural Area at Suitland, MD, just outside of DC. So, on the somewhat overcast Memorial Day of 2018, I headed out to see if I could find some Sarracenia.

This link gives you the lay of the land and public transport directions. Suitland is just over the border from DC and is serviced by the Washington Metro via Suitland Station. Although I read that the Washington Metro has a bit of a bad reputation, I found it very efficient and impressive, especially the architecture of the underground stations. Its then about a 45-minute walk on the sidewalk (or a five minute Uber!) to the bog itself.

  

Here’s the entrance to the preserve as seen from Suitland Road. The gate is a superb piece of metal art. Although it is locked to prevent car access (and presumably vandalism) further in, there is ample parking.

At the entrance was a big clump of Asclepias syriaca, or butterfly weed, the host of the Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). We take Monarchs (locally called the “Wanderer”) for granted here in Australia, but they are in serious trouble in North America. I saw no sign of them on my last visit to North America in 2012 (British Columbia and Colorado), but this time I saw some, as well as the similarly patterned Viceroy, and the Easter Tiger and Black Swallowtails.

The bog itself is a short walk in from the carpark and enclosed by a chain-wire fence with a gate. A boardwalk takes you out over the bog proper.

I was quietly anxious that I might not find many plants, but this worry evaporated the second I entered the bog – the flowers announced the presence of the Sarracenia immediately.

I found myself in paradise, with Sarracenia everywhere.

The plants are growing along and in a slow moving creek in the midst of woodlands. Most were growing with their rhizomes either sitting in or just above the water. Their distribution within the bog was deceptive at first glance – most of the biggest clumps were growing under dense shrubs and small trees, with relatively few plants growing fully exposed to the sun amongst grasses.

It turns out there was a good reason why so many were growing under suboptimal conditions – read on to find out why!

  

The density and vigour of the plants, especially those under the more optimal conditions, proved that this population was healthy. That said, even the plants growing under less optimal conditions were forming large clumps.

I was told there was a late spring in the US this year, and the weather before and during my stay was relatively overcast and wet. The plants did not have much colour when I visited for this reason. But if you looked beneath the new growth, the colour of last year’s growth was still visible.

Here is some of the variation I saw:

       

Given most of the “venosa” I’ve acquired and grown in Australia turned out to be S. rosea, it was great to see the genuine article.

A small part of the bog has Sphagnum growing in it. I was later told by a member of the preserve management committee that the Sphagnum was translocated from another bog.

The above picture links to a video capturing the ambience of the bog. Its soundtrack is the crickets and birds, occasionally marred by a speeding car or a C-17 on departure from nearby Andrews AFB (I was hoping for one of the UH-1N Twin Hueys of the USAF 1st Helicopter Squadron, but oh well).

Its worth noting that, from an ecological management perspective, that the Sarracenia are not the focus of conservation at the bog. In fact, the Sarraenia purpurea growing at the site are not the original population, which was extirpated many decades ago. Instead, they were translocated from New Jersey (I would presume from the Pine Barrens). The main conservation aim at Suitland is to preserve the last local example of a Magnolia bog, and management focuses on preservation of the swamp magnolia and several rare grasses, not the Sarracenia. This blog notes that Sarracenia removal is actually part of the management action suite there - hence why so many of the older plants were growing under suboptimal conditions! Another post from the same blog notes (as did a 1970s hydrology paper for the site) that Drosera filiformis once occurred here, as did Drosera intermedia as recently as 2007. I either missed the D. intermedia, or they have indeed disappeared.

 

I had hoped to see the pitcher plant mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii, at the bog. On Memorial Day, I saw – and was bitten by – a few mosquitoes, but they turned out to be Aedes vexans and Psorophora ferox (the latter has cute white socks!). As I was in the US working on mosquitoes, I was fortunate to visit and key out specimens in the mosquito collection at Smithsonian/Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit (also at Suitland), and made a point of examining and photographing some Wy. smithii specimens (which had also been collected at Suitland Bog). Some iphone-down-the-microscope-lens style shots are above.

Speaking with the Smithsonian curators, I was told that I must have been a couple of days too early, and that if we visited again, Wyeomyia should be flying. We called in on our way home to try our luck again and found them in abundance, flitting delicately from pitcher to pitcher.

They were more interested in feeding on the red veins of the traps than biting us (most populations of Wy. smithii are amphibian feeders, with just a few records of human feeding). The overcast conditions unfortunately made it very hard to photograph them. The below picture links to an iphone video of them in action:

In addition to the Sarracenia, a few other plants at the bog are worth mentioning. Rose Pogonia orchids (Pogonia ophioglossoides) were blooming right by the entrance:

Unfortunately, I was about a month too late to see blooms of the Lady Slipper orchids (Cypripedium acaule) also reported to grow there. Further in along the boardwalk were two species of Jack-in-the-Pulpit.

 

The downside of getting to visit the US is that I had no chance to plant the potted Sarracenia back into bog gardens this winter. Even worse, a broken glass door the afternoon before a –8C night cooked the few non-terrarium Nepenthes I had here (my N. ampullaria and N. x hookeriana are doing well though). As the plants are breaking dormancy now, the opportunity to re-establish the bogs has passed for this year. On the plus side - the collection is shooting up what looks to be a bumper year for flowers, so stay tuned for photos soon.

PS – and while I missed out on a flypast at Suitland, I did get to see a USAF 1st Squadron Twin Huey (in fact, I was even allowed to strap in and run through the startup checks by the pilots :D ).

A great end to a fantastic trip.