PA plant sale review

rja@sun.com (Robert.Allen@Eng)
Mon, 13 Jul 92 10:14:21 PDT

Let's see if this gets through...

I was a volunteer at the Palo Alto Junior Museums' plant
sale and show last Saturday. Peter D'Amato, Chuck Powell,
and Carl Wong were present selling CP. Each of them plus
Geoff Wong had put some of their prize winning plants on
display. I spent 3 hours on my feet answering questions
of curious visitors. You would be surprised how many people
out there grow CP! I'm getting the impression that local
organisations can do a lot to increase CP interest. Since
some CP are endangered, this couldn't hurt. In my talks
I stressed that many of the CP shown were native only to
the US, and that the flytrap and cobra lilly were native
to only very small parts of the US. People seemed quite
impressed that these plants weren't as common as one might
think.

I didn't buy anything, since I have many a number of the
species which were forsale, and my room is limited. Prices
ran $5-15.00 for potted plants.

There were some very nice specimen plants on display. Peter
brought his S. minor "Giant", which is about 2.5' tall.
Geoff Wong brought many of his beautiful plants, including
a very nice D. regia. Geoff also brought his prize-winning
display of Genlisea. He has taken one of those two piece,
clear and black plastic, cubes, which you often see small
things displayed in. He inverted the black base, drilled
some holes in the bottom, and planted the genlisea in there.
This is stacked on top of the clear "top", now the bottom,
of the box, and the whole thing is put in a larger, inverted,
clear plastic box. Then the base of the unit, all clear, is
filled with water. The genlisea traps have grown down from
the soil, into the water, so that they are hanging about
2' down into the water. It's a very nice display.

Robert