"in vitro" means the plants are grown in a bottle, in agar with
nutrients. Typically it implies that the plants were cloned from
a meristem.
If you get them in the bottle, which we probably would not for
onesy-twosies, you have to carefully harden off the plants, then
remove them from the bottle, carefully rinse the agar off the
miniscule root system, and pot them up.
I suspect that the ones we'd get would be hardened off already,
I hope, and would have the agar removed from the roots.
>>
>>4) The e-mail said "...I assume these are VERY small plants. If the
>> Nepenthes are more than an inch in diamater, I'd be surprised."
>> An inch-dia. Nepenthes vine is pretty big in my experience. Are
>> we talking about a thin section of the vine, which has been
>> cultivated in a sterile environment? What exactly can one
>> expect these "plants" to look like, and how delicate are they
>> compared to a fully intact plant?
The 1" diameter is for the entire rosette of the plant, not
the vine. These are essentially the size of perhaps an 8
month old seedling, based on other in-vitro stuff I've seen
from Thomas Alt. Basically your money gets you a seedling
which may or may not survive, depending on how good your
culture is and how lucky you are.
On the plus side, the prices are very good for the exotic
species, and this is probably the only way you're going to
get them. It's certainly a gamble, but I would hope that
the seller has worked out the details enough that they can
give you a reasonable chance of success of cultivation.
Robert