Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 14:17:23 -0800 From: "Kelley, Ian" <IKelley@littler.com> To: cp@opus.hpl.hp.com Message-Id: <aabcdefg3483$foo@default> Subject: Introduction
I am told by the listserv that the local custom is for new subscribers
to issue a short introduction, so here it is.
I am a 29 year old law student and computer consultant living in San
Francisco, California.
Like so many enthusiasts my introduction to CP came in the form of a
string of plastic-cup venus flytraps, bought and promptly killed in an
ongoing orgy of black-thumbedness. Me and my childhood friend took out
every book in the library, wrote away to the nurseries, looked at the
glossy catalogues, and drooled over the pictures. We sent away for some
and continued to have little success, which I credit to the conventional
wisdom at the time that CP should be grown tropical terrarium style and
be kept gorged with hamburger meat. We expanded our collection, and
were soon killing not only Dioneae but some Sarracenia and Drosera as
well. Frustration ensued, and we moved onto cactii.
Cut ahead 15 years, and me and same childhood friend are living and
working 3000 miles away in San Francisco. A drunken conversation of
childhood reminiscence finds us one Saturday morning winging to
Guerneville, 70 miles north of the City and home of Peter D'Amato's
magnificent enterprise. $100 dollars later (the joy of being a grown
up) and we were on our way.
My chum lives in a house and was at liberty to take his collection
outside, an available option in the cool, sunny clime of San Francisco.
I am an urban box-dweller, and am forced to confine my collection to the
several square feet available to me on the windowsill boxes I hastily
constructed that same day.
2 years later and our collections are thriving. I have a
westward-facing window in which I use the pot-in-tray method
exclusively. The first year I used water run through the Brita, but
have been using the local tap this year with no ill-effect (that I've
seen). Everything grows happily on the windowsill with the exception of
Nepenthes and Darlingtonia, which I haven't been able to get to take- I
have about 50 small to medium pots with some 22 species, representing
most all of the Sarracenia, several robust Dioneae, more garden-variety
Drosera than I can shake a stick at, and a Cephalotus growing at such an
explosive rate I'm thinking my apartment is radioactive. There are some
beautiful Sarracenia hybrids, courtesy of California Carnivores, and my
windowsill has created a strange symbiosis with the ubiquitous local
ants which crawl, lemming-like, into the rubras and flavas, filling and
tipping the pitchers.
Getting ready to put them out onto the fire escape for winter, next year
holds bigger and deeper window boxes and our first forays into
propogating Sarracenia from seed which we have diligently harvested this
year.
My CP interests are many and not particularly specific, although I'd
like to read more testimonials and get clever tips from other urban
enthusiasts who must make do with tight space- my interest far outweighs
my square footage, and I'm curious about others' novel approaches. This
post represents my first formal foray into the collectors world, and
while I know there are many disciplined collectors for whom taxonomy and
cultivation are as much science and art, my particular collectors joy is
the sort where you sit on a sunny day, looking at the million drops of
liquid on the Sundews and grinning like some sort of idiot. Such a
strange peace from these plants! I love it.
There's the introduction. Feel free to write directly at
ian@gowestyoungman.com, and thanks to whoever maintains this excellent
list.
Feed dem plants!
Ian Kelley
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