Marcus B

Cephs do odd things for no apparent reason, whether grown from seed or from cuttings. This is not unusual. It may end up a faster growing plant, or it may stall after growing a couple of larger traps while the other plants spread more and then grow mature traps. You just have to wait and see.

Where abouts in the USA do you live? If you live in a temperate area you should not have problem growing them outside. I grow all mine outside with some under basic shelter. Cold temperate may be a bit too cold for all year. Cephs do best if the water flows through the mix so undrained is not idea and is likely to result in root rot. Aquariums need a certain amount of calcium in the water any and will produce acids so any leaching is not likely to be an issue, but for the Cephs that may be an issue. However, the peat may over come this issue and as you say Cephs are resilient, so it is worth trying.

The problem is that people cannot seem to prove where their plants originated from, so this would not help unless you took cuttings from one plant and sent them to different places to then compared how they look. Having done this with other Cephs over a smaller area I know that the same clone can appear some what different in different conditions, which is what can give rise to some people thinking that they have something special when it is the growing conditions that produce the seemingly unique feature. It also may be why some plants that are supposed to be the same clone appear different. However, some have tested this also by obtaining different looking plants that are both supposed to be HGs and growing them together. This has not shown them to be the same so it is apparent that different plants are being sold as HGs, which is why people are trying to work out which is the real one. Does that make things clearer, or am I still missing what you are trying to convey?

Some of us have tried to do this in the past. The problem with Cephs is that unless you grow them under very controlled conditions they can vary throughout the year and from year to year. Where I live we have variable weather with extremes of heat and cold at various times of the year and my plants get little protection from that. Photos of plants from different places don't tell you as much as plants grown together in controlled conditions would. As I have said in the past, it is the tendency for certain plants to produce certain traits more readily that seems to be what distinguishes them and that is not captured by photos. I wish it was clearer than that, but it does not seem to be.

I agree with you that it is not an overly helpful name, but "Giant" is the name that it was distributed under. If I give it another name then I will just be adding to the problem. For me the best I have got was about 75 mm, but I have seen it with larger pitchers. The fact that what we received was simply called "Giant" is probably part of the reason why I cannot confirm if anyone else still has it, apart from the people that I have sent it to.

This is the problem, it seems that none of us have kept accurate records because none of us considered it necessary at the time. We were more focused on just sharing the plants and making sure that any unusual ones got distributed around to try to ensure that someone managed to continue to grow it. From what I have found out it appears that all of the other "Giant" cephs from the batch distributed at VCPS were lost or the owners have dropped out of contact. John's plant may be the same plant, but as it has been named differently, and he cannot trace it further back, we cannot be sure, so the problem remains. In any case we have plants with big pitchers here in cultivation which is a good thing.

You are not alone on that one.

Quite frankly if either versions of the story I have been told were true, then the material had to have been sent to more than just VCPS, as what was distributed us was supposedly a small amount of material of a larger shared volume. The material was then used to grow about 15 plants which were sold at a meeting. Allen seems to think that none made it back to WA. Some of those who I thought would have had it were keen to buy plants when I was checking on who else had them and how valid the story was. The biggest pitchers that I have seen were probably over 80mm on a two year old cutting that I had sold the year before, and that plant was dark in colour too. Charles told me years ago that John Hummer grew his plants under the benches of his hot houses to get the best sized pitchers.

Sorry, Fred, but the way I read this is that Charles sold a plant as a HG and the new owner achieved larger pitchers than he has. In the face of being told that he may have sold plants that are not HGs as HGs, he is putting the case that it certainly appears to be a HG. However, the issue may be that his plants were not "officially be HGs" because he got them before it was recognised as a registered clone, even though that is what John himself sold them as. It would be bit like if "Giant" was registered as clone and all of the older cuttings from it were dismissed as being "Giant" simply because they were sold prior to the name becoming official. Then the owner of the cutting that has since produced bigger pitchers than what I have achieved, from a plant I sold him a few years ago being told his "Giant" is not genuine because it did not come from the person who registered it after they did so.

I must say you confused me too. In any case I will repeat myself. I have been told by a few people, including Allen Lowrie, that the material that was used to produce the "Giant" supposedly came from John Hummer before HG was named. That is as close I got to tracing it due to the death of the person who took delivery of it and propagated it before passing it on to a few of us. As far as I am concerned that does not really prove its origin. It seems that alternatively it may have come from the same material that was sent to John, thus it makes it very vague, as again the person that could confirm that has died. So basically I ran into two dead ends with majority view leaning towards the first one. I had been trying to find out if anyone else in Australia had the "Giant" and could trace its origins, but I been unsuccessful in that area. "Giant" certainly matches a number of characteristics of HG, but that does not prove that it is HG. While trying to investigate its origins I came across someone selling another "giant", with a name attached to it. Hoping it was someone else with same plant, I investigated further only to find that someone had renamed another plant that I already had in my collection. This had come from the breaking up of a plant that my "Giant" had previously come second to in our shows. This plant also produces large pitchers, although not as large as "Giant" can. Based on this it was renamed, instead of being sold under the name it had been known by, but which would not mean anything to anyone not familiar with it. This as I have said before is one of the problems we face, people naming plants to keep track of particular clones and someone else receiving that same plant and renaming it. Or people receive plants for the same stock and giving them different names.

I have a photo, that Charles sent to me, that is of one of his plants from Phil Man, that he had grown in a special set up and achieved pitchers of the same size, but not same morphology, as the HGs in his collection. So no he does not think that any plant that has big pitchers is a HG. He was in fact showing me that large pitchers can be a response to ideal conditions that favour them. HGs have a greater tendency to produce large pitchers than other Cephs in his collection.

Charles has already repeated what he told me long ago. "When I heard that a fellow, by the name of John Hummer, was selling Giant Cephalotus plants, I jumped at the chance of getting some and from that point on, I continued to purchased lots of plants from John." Does that not count?

As for colouration, if the HG is anything like the "Giant", it tends to colour up to a lesser extent than other clones. That said, the "Giant" colours up well when small or in small pots but large pots of it in the same conditions stay green with small flecks of colour in my set up. On occasion I have got it to go very dark, and one young plant that I sold was shown to me a year later with pitchers bigger than anything I have achieved and the plant was a dark as any other Ceph in my collection.

I think this may be a misunderstanding. From what I remember of what Charles told me about 20 years ago, he had been buying Cephs from John before the HG became available. He already had sizeable collection (300+ plants) by about then and was in the process of learning to grow the HG. Correct me if I am wrong Charles.

I remember Phil sharing about his discovery of another giant sized Ceph on the ICPS forum. Unfortunately he got flamed by a newby and took offence. I never heard anything more about it.

I remember Charles telling me about his trips to see John and to learn how he grew his plants, practises that I tried to put in to place with my plants, to which only the "Giant" responded with larger pitchers. However, Charles has also shared with me how he has obtained larger pitchers from other clones.

As far as I am concerned, the "Giant" that I have has a tendency to grow to similar size, but rarely has the matching mid-rib. Its being from the same stock is hearsay, as those who could confirm it have died. Allen Lowrie assures me that the story is true, but even so, it would only be from the same stock as the HG, so unless it was material sent back from John Hummer, it would not technically be the same clone. On this point I have no clear story, only that it was disturbed around the time that John distributed his samples prior to naming the HG. That is why I will not re-label my plants. Things are confusing enough. My plants are only supposedly from the same stock.

Personally I don't think you can be confident if you cannot trace the origin.

It would be likely. I put my pots into deep polystyrene tubs of water to keep them cool. If there are several days of heat then the water will need to be changed to stop it from retaining the heat. The roots need to be kept cool.

Collectors Corner is not too far from me and yes I have to protect my plants from heat. We usually get several days over 40oC during summer. A few year's ago it got over 47oC two days in a row. I use shade cloth and deep trays of water to cool my plants in such weather as they prefer more mild temperatures of mid-twenties. Plants in small pots can get cooked at high temperatures and I have had a few die that way. Some of the growers in WA who are north of their natural distribution also use shade cloth to protect their Cephs.

I have had the odd pitcher like that, but I think it was usually associated with a bit of damage from mealybugs in the bud stage. This one looks pretty healthy though.

It was supplied to VCPS via Paradisia Nurseries, when one of our members, who has since died, was working there. It is my understanding that Paradisia simply supplied the place to cultivate it from the material that was received. They believe it to be from the HG stock, before it was granted cultivar status, but cannot prove it. Allen Lowrie told me that he heard that it came from John Hummer's material (or possibly from the material John Hummer was sent), but again he cannot confirm it. Quite a few of us grew it, but it seems that mine is the only survivor of what was sent to us. Where else the same material was sent I have not heard.

This is why I keep my giants only labelled as "Giant", even though I am told they are supposedly from the same material as the HG. That is the label they to me came under and I can find no firm evidence to say they came from John Hummer even though they were distributed around the time that he sent out material. Hummer's material came from Adelaide, so it may be the case that material from the same plant is still here, but with those who could confirm this having died, I only see speculation at this point. I would love to be able to say otherwise. That said, "Giant" certainly grows similarly in good conditions.

It may well depend on your conditions and the set up employeed. If you can get a flow of water through it, it may be all the difference. My issue may be partly that I used to use automated overhead watering and now I manually water with plants sitting in trays. Even plants in my basket pots went backwards, but these were in much better condition than those in ordinary pots, even though they had more sphagnum around them. Correct my if I am wrong, but from most of what I have read and seen in photos, cephs grow best where there is movement of the ground water, even if the substrate is putrid, which may be key.

Greetings Louis, I am re-potting in Canadian peat, as it seems better than the Kiwi peat that I was using, which is not as good as it was in the past. I have found a source of course sand similar to what I used in the past that I am mixing in with peat. The sphagnum can stay on top as I am trialing shade cloth under gravel at the base instead. The parent plant has recently died back to a tangle of dark rhizomes wrapped around an orangish rhizome that is as thick as my thumb. It seems that that mix did much better in the warmer weather during the drought years than now.