Are all children fascinated by the idea of carnivorous plants?  I know I was.  For me it was sundews, those sprung traps that a fly moving on them three times in a second or two caused them to snap shut on them and immure them.  For my husband it was the Pitcher Plants, Sarracenia.  We used to see these behind glass at Kew in the Princess of Wales Glass house when we went each February to see the Orchid displays, their marbled, hooded pitchers standing tall.   I knew they needed poor, damp, acidic soil, and as I’d only seen them in this glass house, assumed they were not hardy in this country.  However, I have found a big display growing outside at RHS Wisley, and have discovered that many of them are hardy herbaceous perennials.  Here’s a long shot of the RHS Wisley display in June:-

Here a closer view:-

Having attended a Carnivorous Plant Society Show at Wisley, I can tell you that they don’t have to been grown in the ground, they can be grown in pots, great news for those of us who don’t have acidic bog conditions in our gardens!  The growing medium does have to be fairly inert like coir/perlite.  A good mix is 3 parts coir to 1 part perlite.  You could also use lime-free, washed sharp sand or horticultural grit instead of perlite to give some weight to the pot so the tall species won’t topple over. 

Sarracenias need to be watered with rain water, definitely not even tap water in our area as it will have lime in it.  They need to be kept moist – so if you are growing them in pots sit the pot in a tray of water in the summer, but keep it just moist in the winter as they die down and enter their winter dormancy.   Too wet and the rhizome could rot.   They need to be grown in full sun, in fact too little sun (ie if they are overshadowed by other plants or foliage) is the main way for them to get killed off it seems.)  This would be easier for us if we grew them in pots, as most plants here have to fight each other for the light in the ground.

One himself particularly likes is this S. ‘Colin Clayton’ with the white marbling to the tops of the Pitchers, it looks most like the ones we saw at Kew:-

We were even more interested to make the effort to grow them when we discovered that each pitcher of a large plant can eat 200 flies in a season, a definite bonus for us.    Most Sarracenia are from North America, and whilst there are some from Florida and further south, most can withstand our winter temperatures down to -10 degrees. 

Seeing these plants in June at Wisley, many had this “strange” protruberence on a long stalk:-

This, it turned out was its flower!  It simply never occurred to me that a Pitcher Plant might have a flower.  Apparently these come out first in the early spring, before the pitchers form, and at that point the petals hang down.  (I can’t show you a picture of that having never seen them at that time.)  This is so that the bees are attracted to the flowers to pollinate them, but so that they don’t get caught in the pitcher, which exudes a different feremone/secrection that bees don’t get attracted to.  Once it is pollinated the petals turn upwards to protect the flower from further unwanted insect attention.  (It seems if you grow several different Sarracenia close together they hybridise quite easily, which is how there are so many slightly different named varieties available.).   You can propagate Sarracenia from seed – which you can collect and require stratification (a period of cold) before they will germinate.  Having seen some tiny pitcher plants for sale with the cutest mini pitchers less than a couple of centimeters long, I was tempted to buy, however, it takes up to 6 years for plants to mature.  A much quicker method of propagation is by division of your large plant.  This you would do in the winter before any growth happens.  The rhizomes as they grow divide into multiple growing points which you can pull away from the main plant and pot up.    I have also heard that if you don’t want seeds/flowers you can cut the flowers off as they come up and the plant will form its Pitchers a month earlier.

Here are a selection of various hardy Pitcher Plants I snapped growing outside at RHS Wisley:-

Here’s Mitchell’s Pitcher Plant – Sarracenia x michelliana  C43:-

And here is a close up of its flower:-

By contrast, a Sarracenia with a shorter wider Pitcher – S.’Vogel’:-

A very fuzzy photo of a completely deep red Pitcher – S. ‘Thomas’:-

This one is S. Purpurea subsp. purpurea (The Reddish Purple Pitcher Plant):-

Both of these plants are S. x Catesbaei, even though they look very different in growth:-

This one is called Sarracenia x exornata:-

My photo of this one – Sarracenia ‘Dutch Stevens’ – shows how tall the flowers get compared to the Pitchers:-

And just to show you how varied the pitchers can seem in coloration within one plant here is a different Mitchell’s Pitcher plant – Sarracenia ‘Juthatip Soper’:-

Another interesting thought we were presented with at the Carnivorous Plants society show was that the Victorians were keen on growing Butterworts in their glass houses of Orchids so they would catch fungus gnats on their sticky leaves.  Hmmn, just the thing maybe for those of us with orchids or other houseplants?

Finally, following on from our timely email from the HPS Seed Distribution Team, a photo of something I’ve been doing in the garden during this August:-

As you can see, this seed collection method is very high tech – old yoghurt pots with plant names scribbled on bits of envelope to remind me what they are.  I keep a stash of pots handy down the garden with a pencil and an envelope, so as I find a plant with ripe seeds I can harvest them and stick a label in them straight away.  If I can’t remember the name of the plant I put, for example, “big (or tall) yellow scabious flower, gravel garden” on it, so I can recall the plant and then hunt its name later – for the life of me I cannot remember at the time that this is Cephalaria gigantea but that descriptor, and the bed its in shows me its not the “little yellow scabious, long border” – Scabiosa columbaria subsp. ochroluca.    Then I can clean these seeds at my leisure and get them in their envelopes for sending in by the 25th October. 

Next month an unexpected opportunity that presented itself in October 2020 to undertake some garden maintenance around those old shrubs I talked about rejuvenating last month.

Sheila May