carambola

This weekend I went to a carnivorous plant convention here in Belgium and bought a Pinguicula gigantea for € 6, potted up as well, which is about the size I would call 'S'. It's still three times as big as the P. gigantea I got from heldros.pl last year is now. Buying from a hobbyist is of course not the same as buying from a store. For the record, my complaint is not that the plants are small, but that they're too expensive for their diminutive size. The shops lure you into thinking you'll get a bigger plant because they don't show any pictures of the size you should expect. I wouldn't complain if they were more upfront about the actual sizes you're going to get, like they were for the Darlingtonia by accurately describing the size of the plant in text. At least then you know that you're buying a very small plant that will take 1-2 years longer to grow into a mature specimen. Luckily, all of the plants are still doing well. (I hope it didn't come across that way, but I'm also not complaining about 'Eastern Europeans' in general, either. I've bought lots of plants from forum members over the years, and I've always been very happy with how big and healthy the plants were. In fact, the reason I logged on today was to see if any of them were selling anything I'd like.)

Six years later I finally got around to ordering that P. gigantea 'White Flower', as well as a couple of other Pinguicula, and a Darlingtonia. I received the package earlier this week. The plants appear to be healthy, but as soon as I saw the package, I remembered why I stopped buying plants from Eastern European webshops: the prices look great, but the plants you receive are much, much, much smaller than you'd ever get when buying locally. Just to give an example, P. gigantea is a plant that reaches up to 30 cm in diameter. The one I ordered was size S as that was the only size left. Which diameter would you expect to receive if you ordered a P. gigantea in size S? Would it be... drumroll... 3 cm, with a total of four leaves? That's right, the leaves are exactly 1,5 cm long. If you accidentally sneeze when potting it up (because - another reason why I stopped ordering abroad - you get bare-rooted plants¹), you've lost it forever. I paid 9 EUR / 36 PLN for it, which seems pretty damn expensive for such a miniature specimen. A webshop in Western Europe wouldn't even dare sell plants of such a pitiful size, and going to any plant convention these are the size hobbyists like us hand out for free. The other plants I ordered were two Pinguicula with which I have similar size concerns, and a Darlingtonia in size XS which was exactly the size I expected, because the approximate diameter was listed in the description. The Darlingtonia was kept potted up. Ironically, this XS Darlingtonia is more than twice the diameter of the S P. gigantea. Well, lesson learned - stop buying from Eastern European shops who sell overpriced, ridiculously small plants. Sigh... ¹ I know this is to save on shipping, but for miniature plants, the additional weight of having them potted up would be negligible, and it saves the store the work of uprooting it, cleaning the roots, wrapping it in sphagnum, etc. Not to mention, I'd gladly pay a bit more for shipping if it meant not having to go through the hassle of immediately potting everything up and babying the plants until they recover from transplant shock on top of being sat packed in a small box for over a week.

You can say the same thing about any temperate plant species...

"Indoor plant"... In case you don't know (and there's no shame, especially when stores lie to you), Sarracenia are very much outdoor plants, they come from North America, from a temperate climate. You can probably keep them alive indoors for a while, but just like you wouldn't grow violets in your living room, Sarracenia should really be kept outdoors at all times. Unfortunately, it looks like they're completely dried up, although by now you probably already know.

That could just be a temporary mutation, just like how occasionally there's an extra or a missing flower petal.

Very interesting, thanks!

For what it's worth, my binata, that are outside all year, are also suffering from the dry weather. On top of that, because they're a lot weaker than they normally are, they're infested by aphids. Interestingly, var. binata seems to struggle a lot more than var. multifida (with regards to both the dry weather and the aphids). Perhaps it's something to do with var. multifida being about twice as big, with much thicker petioles and thick roots.

It doesn't really matter, but there's not much of a point in cutting them off at that point. Plants put a lot of energy into flowering, but as soon as the flowers are 'finished', they're essentially just fancy leaves (which can still photosynthesise) and don't require any extra energy. By the way, cutting them off when they're still growing, which is often claimed to help the plant grow faster, isn't really helpful either, because the plant will simply try to create more flower stalks and so will actually spend more energy on flowering in the end.

Looks like water fleas (Cladocera) from what I can tell. They don't really help the plant digest, but they aren't harmful creatures either. After watching the video clip a couple of times, I noticed something else: there's a small bug crawling on the outer right side of the leaf. I wonder if this is footage of its last living moments before it fell into the Sarracenial abyss.

Both are correct in a way. Drosera (and in fact many other plants) quickly turn red if there's enough sunlight as a means to protect against being burned. At this point the plants are most definitely burned, despite the red colour mechanism, because they haven't seen light of such intensity for a long time. These leaves won't produce dew anymore. The new leaves, however, will be adapted to the strong lights, won't burn, but will still look reddish. The red colour goes away again as the light intensity diminishes. Usually, Drosera leaves will be a dark green, with red tentacles. It's all very similar to humans getting a tan to protect against the sunlight. If you stay in the sunlight for too long before your skin has managed to acclimatise (by tanning), you'll get burned.

It won't work unless you plan on taking the plants out every winter, but then I don't think there'd be much of a point to the terrarium. Dionaea, Sarracenia and temperate sundews must hibernate during winter, which will be virtually impossible in a terrarium. There are plenty of species that like a constant temperature year-round, though. Nepenthes, Heliamphora, tropical Drosera, tropical Utricularia, Stylidium, ...

Nice picture! That's definitely going to be a successful Drosera when it grows up. They're very interesting species to watch as they grow from seed to maturity - there's always something going on.

Heliamphora aren't as difficult as people make them out to be, but you have to get a strong specimen/clone (as with anything). I have been growing what I think is Heliamphora nutans x ionasii (I don't label my plants), bought from one of the forum members (I no longer have the messages so I can't tell whose it was or which species it is), on my windowsill next to some Adeniums, Vanilla, date palm, some kind of tree fern, etc (just to give you an idea of the variety of things that do well on a windowsill), and it's growing marvelously well. Unfortunately this summer I made a mistake in its watering schedule and didn't water it for two weeks, so it lost a lot of leaves and subsequently nearly succumbed to a mold infestation, but after giving it a good soaking, picking away all of the dead leaves, adding some fresh live Sphagnum on top and putting a bunch of Trichoderma in the pot as well (though I'm not sure if this last step really had any effect), it's now producing healthy leaves again. There's even a fern growing in its pot and it still doesn't seem bothered by it. I'd posted a picture of it in all its former glory last year, but it looks like it was lost during the forum 'crash' late last year. I'll see if I can dig it up again. All this is essentially just to say that Heliamphora aren't as picky as people often claim. There's a lot of misinformation going around in carnivorous plant growing circles, and I think it's because people tend to believe the first thing they read (like people putting icecubes on the moss of their Heliamphora during summer to keep the roots cool). How much ice do they think there is to be found on those tepuis?

I think that might have something to do with the rain splashing down on peat and creating a lot of extra splashes in the process. In my experience, after it's poured for a few days, plants growing in peat seem to look worse for longer than those growing in sphagnum moss.

Looking good! It's a nice idea to make it look more natural than just a long vining plant leaning against a bamboo stick.