Re: Drosophyllum

Phil (cp@pwilson.demon.co.uk)
Wed, 18 Sep 1996 22:24:45 GMT

> All the plants I saw (about 100-150 plants) at the site I visited were
compact, upright
> little shrubs. In fact, their stems were all very short (maybe 5cm max),
making it look like
> all the leaves grew out of a single growing point. The biggest one I
saw was no more than
> 40cm tall, and this has nothing to do with their age, as the largest ones
were quite old plants
> with thick (1cm) stems and lots of dried leaves from previous seasons. I
don't remember
> whether the plants Slack described were ones he saw in the wild or
cultivation specimens
> (I suspect the latter), but I would imagine that this plant might get a
long, sagging
> stem due to lack of sufficient sunlight. The ones I saw grew on a
south-facing slope in
> strong, direct sunlight all day long. Other people have mentioned to me
that their own
> plants had long, sagging stems, and it just so happens that all of them
live at higher,
> cooler latitudes than me.

I lost my original plant late last year which had been grown in a
greenhouse. It too had developed into a straggling plant with long stems.

My current plant was grown from a seed from the original and is now a
little over a year old. It has spent all spring and summer outdoors and has
instead developed as a very compact busy plant with little if any stem and
is around 20cm tall. The leaves are virtually black with trapped insects
which is a wonderful demonstration of it's ability as an insect catcher. I
have grown this plant using a method I read about in one of the Australian
CP journals. The seed was germinated in a peat pot and grown in this
through the last winter. To keep the peat pot from disintegrating I kept it
in a plastic pot. This spring I potted the plant, still in the peat pot in
as large a plastic pot that I could find (about 250 - 300cm from memory).
Throughout I used very free draining mixture of about 70% sand, 20% peat
and 10% smooth 10mm gravel - the sort sold in aquarium shops. I also
dressed the top of the soil with the gravel. The advantage of this method
over the one shown in Slack's book is that the plant can grow on
undisturbed, the roots easily penetrating through the peat pot. I suspect
that with the Slack method the plant grows really well for the first 2 - 3
years but eventually dies, almost certainly the roots not being able to
succesfully make it from the smaller pot into the larger one.

I find these plants totally frost hardy, although at the end of the winter
they tend to look pretty ragged. Last year my plant took minus 8C in an
unheated greenhouse. Next year the plant will almost certainly flower so
I'll have some seed to experiment with. I'll try a few plants permanently
outdoors next year to see how they cope with a damp cold English winter.

-- 
Phil Wilson
(cp@pwilson.demon.co.uk)