Re: Help!
Robert Beer (bbeer@u.washington.edu)
Thu, 25 May 1995 21:41:49 -0700 (PDT)
> My experience here in South Australia is that the plants do fine with
> low humidity. In summer it can quite easily reach above 40C in
> combination with _very_ low humidity and my plants do not suffer. I
> do make sure they are well watered by standing them in 10 - 15 cm of
> water during these days but apart from that they suffer the vagaries
> of the local weather. You can see a difference in the plants that I
> grow and others that get pampered in a glass house - mine seem more
> robust with thicker walls to the leaves, I have won a few prizes for
> my plants at the ACPS shows :-)
>
I would agree - In the Pacific Northwest the air can get *very* dry
during the summer (so that certain roses, for example, don't do well here
at all), but my Sarracenias do fine. I could see humidity being a
problem if the plants were raised in a high humidity environment and
suddenly exposed to low humidity but not if this is what they are
accustomed to. Many people here do put up some kind of plastic open tent
to conserve a little humidity, and it seems that Venus Flytraps do do
much better, but Sarracenias seem to be unaffected by it. Droseras also
tend to dry out here in open air.
I would suspect some kind of root/rhizome damage that is preventing the
plant from getting water to the leaves. You did well in isolating the
affected plants. Question: you had one plant of one species affected
but not the others; and another species in which all your specimens were
affected: were those propagated from one plant originally? If that is
the case I would suspect a virus or some disease even more, and would get
rid of the plants. As it is, since you have one S. alata that is
affected and others that aren't, I suspect that there is some outside
agent.
Bob