Collection photos – 27 November 2018

Here’s some photos of the collection to show how the colour of the plants has developed since the last photos.

This is a clone of S. flava I call ‘Dragon’ for the intense red of the pitcher mouth, which is reminiscent of a fire-breathing dragon. It is one of the first seedlings I have grown to maturity, the cross being made in 2011 as a selfing of a form of S. flava I’ve called the NSW clone elsewhere on this blog.

 

 

Sarracenia flava var. flava ‘Helmut’s Giant’ showing its very fine and faint throat venation.

 

Some more flava var. flava – a clone from Gotcha! Plants (left) and Helmut’s Maxima.

  

 

Sarracenia flava var. atropurpurea ‘FRT 1-1’.

 

Some years ago, I asked John Creevy if he could try making a cross for me – FRT 1-1 crossed with a very slow and stunted atropurpurea I grew that came from Phil Reyter’s collection. The plant above is the result. This is the first year its been big enough to see the results.

 

I also made this cross, and the seedling at left is what resulted. Its still got a while to go. At right is another atropurpurea from Ron Abernethy’s collection.

 

Another atropurpurea that I am pretty sure came from Owen O’Neil’s collection.

 

Two clones of S. flava var. atropurpurea from Blackwater S.F., Florida.

 

Sarracenia flava var. atropurpurea ‘FRT 1-5’

  

Sarracenia flava var. cuprea ‘Ross Rowe’

 

S. flava var. cuprea – Gotcha heavy vein (left) and ‘David Martin’s F1’ (right).

  

Sarracenia flava var. rugellii, ex collection Phil Reyter.

 

Sarracenia flava var. rugellii ‘Triffid Park clone’ (note – this is not Triffid Park’s ‘cut throat’, which is a clone that has never done well for me at all).

 

Some more home grown plants – a var. rugellii and a selfing of FRT 1-1…

 

And to close, a very nice home grown clone of var. rubricorpora.

Growing Drosera adelae under the Ikea 6W Vaxer grow light

Drosera adelae has long been one of my favourite carnivorous plants. As a kid in Queensland, I had no trouble growing it. But here in Canberra, I have really struggled with it. Summer growing was no problem, but every winter, I would loose it to cold.

This year, we did some work on our house that made it a lot warmer and this allowed me to keep D. adelae alive through the winter. “Alive” being the operative word though - my plants looked miserable to say the least by spring time. After seeing the beautiful plants grown by AUSCPS Canberra member Barry (above), I decided to set mine up like he had done – in a large glass bowl.

As the plants were so miserable, I decided not to stress them further by de-potting them. So I sat the pot directly into the bowl and covered it with a sintered glass plate as a lit. That solved the humidity issues, but not light. Some of the root suckers perked up with the humidity, but the parent plant was still etiolated and green, with saggy leaves and no dew.

About a month ago, I noticed Ikea sell a LED grow light called Vaxer. I brought one of the 6W lamps and its cord set to try out on the D. adelae bowl, with the resting lens down on a sintered glass dish lid. The results were impressive – see the before (top), one week under the lamp (left) and one month under the lamp (right) photos above. The plants coloured and dewed up within days, and within a week, new leaves had unfurled, were showing colour and staying erect.

After a month under the lamp, the plant has produced beautifully coloured new growth, flowered, and is covered in dew. Curiously, under bright light, this clone produces red flowers, but under lower light produces white flowers. I am feeding the plant using fish food (flakes) sprinkled on the leaves. Next up is to plant it out into the bowl after its recovered for a few more weeks, maybe around Christmas.

 

Speaking of the tropical Drosera, I’m very happy to report the D. schizandra are also growing well in their coffee jar terraria, and have produced a few new leaves each – one even produced a small offset (see right photo). If they get any bigger, I’ll see about getting them a larger home. If I can keep these plants growing as well as they are, I’ll see about getting some D. prolifera for another try.

A guided tour of the Sarracenia flava ponds at their peak, Spring 2018

The Sarracenia flava have now hit their peak for the year, and look fantastic (with one exception). Its always a bit of an anxious time as the plants come up – will the wind topple them over this year? Are they going to colour up as well as last year? Its a poor season for insects, is it going to affect pitcher production? And so on. But as the plants open and colour up, most worries evaporate and its time to sit back, relax and enjoy the plants.

Here’s a guided tour of the Sarracenia flava this season:

 

These S. flava var. rugellii were brought at the 2011 AUSCPS Christmas party in Sydney from grower Phil Reyter. I’ve had mixed luck with rugellii; my first was a clone from Gotcha! Plants started out ok, but remained somewhat on the small side and is sensitive to repotting – it seems to be a bit of an underperformer relative to other clones I’ve had since, with Phil’s being one of the better ones. This clone is unfortunately slow to build up to a good size.

 

A new acquisition from 2016 (thanks Owen!), this var. rugellii is another good clone. Its exceptional for being a strong divider that forms good sized clumps, and also for its huge lid. Like all rugellii I’ve ever grown, it only produces a pitcher or two per growing point, but the clumping habit makes up for this. 

Another plant still establishing in the collection after I re-acquired it from Ron Abernethy last year, at right is S. flava var. cuprea x rugellii. Ron tells me this cross was a mistake – he crossed the wrong flower! This plant is sold by Triffid Park and seems to have been exported to a number of countries, so its not done badly at all for an accidental production. Triffid Park now sell one of its siblings as “Brass Top” (ie. Ron tells me '”Brass Top” is from the same cross, but is a different clone). It is a very good clone that performs extremely well, and looks great with the cut throat and heavy veining.

  

A perennial good performer, this var. cuprea is one I call ‘Gotcha! Plants heavy vein’. Gotcha (John Creevey) brought it as seed from Allen Lowrie sometime during the 1980s or 1990s. The veins have not filled in fully yet, and the lid will be very rich copper in colour by midsummer.

 

This beautifully coloured plant is a new one for 2018 – it is a clone grown for many years by fellow Canberra grower Ross Rowe. It outperforms every other var. cuprea I’ve grown in terms of how strongly coloured its hood is. I wonder if it may well come up as an all (or nearly all) red plant in years to come.

In spring 2011, I selfed every S. flava flower I had open and sowed the seeds out in summer 2012. The first of these plants are now at flowering size (I didn’t use any fertiliser to help them along). The above and below plants are some of the progeny. Above left is a var. rugellii and a var. cuprea, and at right a var. flava with a pitcher mouth that fills in all red. They will need their own pots next year, so I’ll carefully put some labels with their rhizomes to mark out what plant is what.

Another seedling I’m very happy with is this S. flava var. rubricorpora (in fact, its the only rubricorpora that coloured up this season). Its the progeny of David Martin’s rubricorpora clone “FRT-1”, which has been badly set back (along with the other rubricorpora in my collection this year) for some reason.

 

A couple of more var. cuprea – at left is a clone I got from Owen O’Neill in 2016, and at right David Martin’s F1, which is now approaching 40 years of cultivation.

 

Here’s some flava var. flava – at left is a clone from Owen O’Neill, and at right, one of the plants I brought at the 2007 ICPS conference in Sydney that re-started my collection. It was one of a number of plants that Greg Bourke donated to the Sydney Botanic Gardens, grown from seed. The parent plant was from a flava population on Honeysuckle Road at Harleyville, North Carolina.

 

Another var. flava, this plant is a very tall clone (biggest pitcher was 74 cm this year) that was grown by legendary Pinguicula grower Helmut Kibelis. Its the largest of my flava this year, but is a few centimetres smaller than one of the leucophylla spring pitchers. It looks like a var maxima, but always gets a tiny amount of red venation.

 

And to finish the var. flava – this handsome plant was also from Helmut, who told me he believed it to be the same as what people in Germany were growing as “Maxima” in the 1980s. As clones get circulated, it is easy for their identity to get confused, and that indeed is what happened with this plant. A quick search shows the plant grown by Slack and distributed as “Maxima” (now as “Slack’s Maxima”) is different, with a smaller hood and more venation. Nonetheless, this is a magnificent clone that always looks great. I’ll refer to it as ‘Helmut’s Maxima’ from now on.

  

On to the flava var. atropurpurea. FRT 1-1 is putting up a spectacular display as always.

My favourite plant, I’ve more or less dedicated an entire growing pond to it.

 

This is a clone of atropurpurea from Blackwater State Forest in Florida. It flowered for the first time this year, and it was used to cross pollinate every other atropurpurea in my collection!

 

To finish up the atropurpurea, at left is another David Martin clone, FRT1-5. At right is a var. maxima I grew until a few years back when I accidentally sold my divisions of it to Owen. It is a tall but robust plant that will eventually produce a weakly copper hood.

 

As a sort of segue into the leucophylla spring pitchers, here’s a flava x leucophylla (= x moorei) backcross from David Martin. Its a slow grower, but produces magnificent rubricorpora-esq. pitchers. This pitcher is 72 cm tall.

 

Here are some of the leucophylla spring pitchers, which are always taller and have different patterning and colouration to the autumn pitchers. The pitcher at left is the largest in the Sarracenia collection this year, standing at 77 cm.

 

And to finish off the Sarracenia - above left is luecophylla cv. “Tarnok”, with its unusual flowers, and at right, a red-veined leucophylla about to open. I’m half tempted to cash-in my leucophylla for S. purpurea after having seen purpurea in the wild earlier this year, but will wait to the end of the season to decide.

Here’s the VFT collection in their own minibog, which is doing very well considering I lost all my plants last year.

 

One plant I found buried under some Sarracenia late last season is the all-red VFT bred and circulated by Peter and Jessica Biddlecombe during the 1980s and 1990s. While not a bad clone, it seems to have been dropped by everyone for newer clones like Pink Venus, Aki Ryu and Red Velvet. I’m also using the VFT minibog for Drosera, which (besides D. binata) get overshadowed by the Sarracenia. The Drosera burmannii and D. pulchella I acquired last season seem to have taken to the garden well too.

 

Some more VFT: at left: B52, and right: Low, Giant.

 

And to close off – here’s one of the cheeky neighbourhood Magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen tibicen) having a wash in the bird bath next to the Sarracenia.