Now now now Kevin, take some oxygen! :)
>>trying to lock up a huge piece of land called the A.C.E. Basin. Of course,
>Is this that huge meteor crator-cum-bog filled with twisted, snarling
>Venus Flytraps?
No. The ACE Basin is in S.Carolina, south of Charleston. It is a region
with large undeveloped pieces of land (pretty damned rare for eastern
seaboard). Look on a map of S.Carolina and 1/2-way from Charleston S.C.
to Savannah Georgia you'll see a big bay, the drainage of the Edisto
and Combahee rivers. Even my US roadmap shows that while the area around
there is a network of roads, very little digs into this piece of land.
While much of it is saline or brackish (and useless for CPs) there's a
lot of freshwater areas too, that house all those lovely carnivores like
Utrics, Sarracenia, and Gators. TNC has enough of the land locked up with
conservancy easements to protect the bay, now they're just seeing what
other bits of land they can get as frosting on the cake.
>Worse, if someone is willing to commit theft and break-and-enter
>somebody's private property, just imagine what they'd be willing to do
>to unprotected plants in the wild!
Who needs to imagine? Just read the reports of what they *are* willing
and *are* doing.
>>3)None of my plants have easily decipherable nametags. The nametags
>>in my pots read something like
>>
>You really did this due to the theft danger? Or just because the full
>data was too much for the label (or writing out on a bunch of labels)?
I started doing this long ago as a time saver when I was stewarding
someone else's collection of a few hundred pots. Then when I got
the first rare Sarrs in my own collectin, I happened to read about a
greenhouse break-in which first looked like simple vandalization, until
the owner noticed that some of his rarest plants were missing.
Inspired by this, I revived the old code practice for my own plants,
even though I only had a dozen or so pots. Now I've got around 55 pots
of mature plants and 52 pots of seedlings (Hey, this collection
is getting big!) so the code is both a security measure and time saver.
Isn't it fascinating that a person who appreciates plants so much that they
will take the time to learn how to key _S.flava_ from _S.oreophila_, or
can distinguish between the common and rare _Nepenthes_, can also
disregard other people's rights so much as to break in and steal these
plants from them. You'd kind of think that there'd be an unbroken code
of cooperation among CPers.
B