A field trip to Barren Grounds Nature Reserve–Part 2

Click here to see Part 1, which covers basic info. about Barren Grounds and Drosera pygmaea.

Click here to see Part 3, which covers Drosera binata, Sphagnum and general wildlife.

Drosera peltata

A field trip to Barren Grounds Nature Reserve –Part 3

(In Part 1, we covered Drosera pygmaea, while in Part 2 we looked at two forms of D. peltata and D. spathulata).

We were up to D. spathulata at Barren Grounds. And growing right next to it in some places is the biggest CP you will find that is native to the Sydney Basin:

Finally! Spring!

Its official (at least according to the Sarracenia flava) – Spring has arrived! The Sarracenia are busy putting up flower stalks that should be open en masse within a week or so.

There is always a first flower, and this year’s first was a Sarracenia flava var. flava clone I brought at the 2008 ICPS conference in Canberra, as a division from the Royal Sydney Botanic Garden’s collection. Its petals are nearly fully unfurled, and it should be in fine form in another couple of days.

Here are a couple of more views of the collection (click to enlarge). As you can see, we are busy with some renovation work…

Its not just the Sarracenia that are up and growing again. I have hundreds of Drosera seedlings coming up throughout the collection. Some of them, like these Drosera burmannii, are supposed to be tropical-subtropical plants, but it can grow in cold places that get regular frost (eg. Tenterfield in northern NSW). If you get enough of a founding population established and flowering, there will be enough to come up and sustain the population. These are an independent collection of the Beerwah clone, plants the came up via blown seeds in the collection of Fly Free Zone, who incidentally, were located at Beerwah. Although Beerwah is subtropical, it sits at the base of the famed Glasshouse Mountains, and receives enough cold that there are a few days of frost each year. This clone manages alright with our much colder winters without protection, so it is probably worth a try in areas with cold winters.

My Drosera filiformis are also unfurling after their dormancy. I grow both subspecies of Drosera filiformis (left photo; tracyii are in the second pot from left)and the red form of the nominate subspecies (right photo). I love D. filiformis because they form dense clumps over time and put on a magnificent display. The red form is spectacular for its colour, but the source clone (ex Living Traps – and no, I don’t know Geoff Roberts or where he is now!) is a little temperamental. Fortunately, it self pollinates and seeds prolificaly. Even though I had the plant flower only once last year due to fertiliser problems (they don’t like it!), I had a few seedlings come up last year and these seem to be a bit more vigorous than the parent plant. I am hoping the most vigorous seedling from last season will flower for me and spread itself throughout the collection.

           

And here are some natives. This Drosera binata is the form that occurs widely in the escarpments of the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra around Sydney. It has a golden colour that becomes deep maroon over the heat of summer. The plants growing with the Cephalotus (also not my sole Nepenthes, a N. khasiana cross) our sunroom are much more advanced than the outdoor plants. I recently saw large numbers of this clone at the Barren Grounds reserve (trip report coming up; for the birders out there, I scored a male southern emu wren on my first try! It is a seriously skulky little bird whose ecological role could be described as a mouse with wings).

And to close, here is a Drosera auriculata from the Grampian Mountains, Victoria. This plant originated from a clone grown by the VCPS. It is hardy enough to survive our winters, but has never grown as big as they were when I got them. It is just about to put up some flowers. In contrast, the allied Drosera peltata at Barren Grounds were finishing up flowering as of last week:

More to come soon…

Dreams of spring…

I hate mid-winter in Canberra. Relative to the rest of the Australia, Canberra gets cold. Earlier this week (Thursday), we had the year’s coldest day to date, a –6.25 C morning (21.5F). This morning’s effort – a –4.7 C (23.5F) was not much better, and as I write this, it is already down to 0.2*C (32F). On top of the cold, the days get short and there is not much around growing or green.

This evening, I was flicking through the accumulation of photos on my phone, and came across these, taken of the Sarracenia last November:

These shots are, for me right now, dreams of what I want Spring to look like – Sarracenia flava pitchers reaching skywards. The plants are mostly Sarracenia flava var. atropurpurea "’FRT 1-5” and one of Triffid Park’s S. flava var. rubricorpora clones. The coppertop is S. flava var. cuprea x var. rugellii, and the clone of S. flava var. flava I got at the ICPS in Sydney (which turns out to be another Honeysuckle Road, Harleyville plant).

These were (at the time) my outdoor plants, essentially all those that did not fit into my greenhouse. While everything in the greenhouse would come up around September, these plants did not come up until November. We have a saying here – if you plant tomatoes before the date of the Melbourne Cup, you are making a sacrifice to the frost Gods. After the Melbourne Cup there is negligible risk of frosts (well, maybe a one-in-ten year risk of a late frost, but safe enough to cover most years).

My Sarracenia seem to keep to the same rules – the plants grown outdoors did not come up until after Melbourne Cup 2012 (and the last risk of frosts) had been and gone. This is what the same plants looked like a few weeks later.

These photos, and those in the last link above, were among the last I took of our plants before we moved house, so they have a sort of nostalgia. I am watching and waiting to see how they will do at our new place.

Notes on Australian Nepenthes mirabilis – Dave Rentz’s blog

Dave Rentz is an entomological colleague and I do not exaggerate when I say he is the world expert on the Orthopteroid orders – aka the grasshoppers, crickets, katyids, stick insects, leaf insects and cockroaches. He used to live here in Canberra, but was retrenched by the CSRIO along with a number of other entomologists I know in the early 2000s. He moved to Kuranda, which is located in the middle of the rainforest near Cairns in north Queensland, Australia. He is lucky enough to live alongside cassowaries in the tropical rainforest. He runs a blog – bunyipco – that I love because it takes me away from Canberra’s cold and gloom and delivers me instantly to the tropics, along with its fauna and flora.

Nepenthes mirabilis has had a few mentions on Dave’s blog, and when we caught up at the recent CSIRO moth workshop, I learned that he is assisting postgraduate student Gary Wilson with a Nepenthes project. Gary is looking at the biogeography, taxonomy and ecology of Australian Nepenthes, and seems to be doing a very fine job. You can read about Gary here, and his Nepenthes work here.

Here are some of Dave’s blog entries on Nepenthes mirabilis near Cairns, in north Queensland. He takes excellent macro photos of Nepenthes in action, so they are definitely worth reading:

http://bunyipco.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/living-dangerously.html

http://bunyipco.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/night-walk-in-tropical-lowlands.html