CARNIVOROUS PLANT Greenhouse Tour — Ep. 245

so this area here is if you were to feel the inside you could feel it's really waxy downward pointing teeth the reason for that is to prevent to prevent things from getting out [Music] while in town in the finger lakes i made a stop at flora collaborative where i met up with ryan georgia to tour their geothermal greenhouse which right now primarily houses carnivorous plants and a tissue culture lab [Music] this is a spa room this is the spa room so these are all most of the plants that we have here are from southeast asia so if you picture a mountain in let's say borneo just visualize a mountain there's the top of the mountain the middle of the mountain and the base of the mountain so right now we're in the base of the mountain the lowland section which typically the temperatures are near around 92 93 during the day and they drop down to about 68 or so at night what really got you into carnivorous plants or nepenthes or that's a loaded question that is i think it all started for me when i was maybe 12 or so in middle school my home ac teacher she introduced me to a person at cornell who sort of took me under her wing and introduced me to more people so for every summer from age 12 to 16 i think i went to start going to cornell kenneth's laboratories primarily which is actually where i work now um part time in a lab there i met a person who was a grad student at the time um and introduced me into pitcher plants ferns and orchids and tissue culture and so that's kind of where that all started that interest that's so interesting that it started with your home ec teacher out of all things and you're getting into like tissue lab and she's a plant person i still see her every once in a while she's actually close friends with with nina yeah and uh yeah i still see her every once in a while and so it's really nice to have her see the full full picture of the full circle of how things kind of happened for me and that she was the she was the catalyst for that yeah huge influence which is amazing and just so folks know nina you know nina's a professor also at uh cornell who is is she a partner here as well she's uh she's actually a majority owner of the company so she's currently teaching two classes she does a herbaceous perennial identification class and she also teaches urban eden as the other class so it's a primary focus around teaching landscape architects how to best identify not only the plants but the correct location in an environment to plant them so she's still teaching that class and yeah and her focus is definitely more of the tree and [Applause] what do you plan woody plants primarily i would say definitely woody plants so she works a lot with oaks right now so take me through is there anything in here that uh you think are like standout specimens even though you know kind of the the lowland varieties maybe not be as as much of your the only reason sure the only reason why it's not as much of a love interest is the temperature the plants are equally amazing um like over here uh these are jose these are sundews so they have the sticky leaves i've always wanted to grow these i just never had the correct setup to be able to grow them they need it really hot i mean really hot like 90s and these are not any native sun none of these none of these are native these are all primarily endemic to australia and they have quite harsh quite uh quite hot conditions they're just the colors are fascinating and the flowers are incredible their behavior in general is kind of unusual just they can actually go dormant for certain periods of time that one with the almost the woolly white leaves is quite attractive i don't think i've ever seen one with like woolly white leaves like that it's funny you say that it's actually the woolly sundew is actually one of one of the common names for for those um is that is a more exposed do you think is it on more exposed areas or i'm not sure if that's really well known i suspect that it does help to capture moisture so like condensation potentially to help acquire or sequester moisture during really dry times because they're often found in very drought prone areas and are you growing these from seed or tissue culture or how are you working on getting them into tissue culture that is a process they actually need they don't self-seed very well this particular group of sundays so having two completely unrelated genetically unrelated plants is challenging they're coming from tissue culture they're coming from one of our suppliers in the czech republic um so that's where these are coming from so as far as propagating them further we're working on that great it's a challenge but great we're working on that so then other plants of interest in here i am a die-hard fan of a species of nepenthes called nepenthes uh vci or vechiae there's there's three different plants here there's actually quite a few what is it about these that really it's almost like an animalistic quality to them if you look closely you can see the hairs they're velvety almost like like the skin of an animal uh very pursuit um the flared peristome so that's that's this part here um sort of kind of like a collar yeah to me they're just really interesting it's a tubby nature of the pitcher itself it's more squat and then a lot of them the ones that are more sought after for collectors in the horticultural community is the is the striping on the on the peristome so not all not all as you can see like this is also uh the pentium doesn't have any striping um so do you select for that uh definitely selecting for that like this one here is a is a male it's coming into flower so the inflorescence here has you can see they're kind of round little balls there so this is just as this is them as they are starting to develop so the inflorescence will continue a lot to elongate like this is a different plant a hybrid but similar of inflorescence the structure this is a female so these are diocese plants meaning there are only one specific sex per plant so one is either male and one is either female so you need to have one of each in order to to make this work um this one happens to be a female if you look closely you can see there's the the stigma right there who's typically pollinating these guys um typically me is that what you're asking well yes but insects ah yeah well of course um typically me typically yeah also me i'm everywhere so there some of them are specie-specific insects i don't think much is known about whether there's wind pollination or not there might be there very well may be it's interesting i've read numbers somewhere around 13 or so of the population in the wild is female versus the rest being male so that specific uh advantage yeah advantage i guess it's more resource oriented for females to produce seed so maybe that's the reason why evolutionarily um so more males just an easier way to to be prolific um but i i don't know enough about each species and the specific insects that pollinate it but it's primarily insects that pollinate these plants i know viewers can't feel this but we're in a a pretty humid greenhouse yes is there any hope for anybody who would take one of these species to try to grow in their home or would they have to have kind of like a polydarium or aquarium some type of setup in order to be able to do it or are most of your customers in this case i have a little outside greenhouse like you do and you're growing them that's a great question and and yes to all of those those points um so i don't i just don't want to get anybody's hopes up you know you can definitely grow them i know a lot of our customers and a lot of growers do very well uh with growing certain species more frequently certain hybrids on windowsills in their homes it takes a little bit more work than your average uh you know house plant yeah but it's definitely doable one of the critical factors is the relative humidity but more so the water and the quality of the water they really need clean water so distilled water rain water that works for pretty much all carnivorous plants i actually recommend that for orchids as well is this something that people can grow at home they definitely are some people have better success in a terrarium it's easier that way you can go away for a weekend and not really have to worry about having somebody come over to water your plants right um so terrariums do make sure they're wrong or water them wrong yes exactly i think starting with with really simple uh you know maybe one plant something small something that is a hybrid they tend to be easier however species like vichy and then there's another one here truncata which actually produces some of the largest pictures in the genus they're more tolerant of fluctuations in the relative humidity in the environment so the main thing with these plants is having them adjust or acclimate to your growing conditions i was going to say do you harden off any of your more humid loving plants at all before you sell them or are they just as is so in the old nursery which is in trumansburg it usually took about five months from when we received plants either out of the lab or when we received them from some of our suppliers usually five to six months before we felt that they were of the quality and the health to be able to pass on to somebody was really important to us but that doesn't mean that that the pitchers aren't going to drop they do they even they'll drop little brown you know as you can see here this is a normal uh you know behavior this is a normal thing to happen where pitchers will will dry up and they can fall off they're actually still able to perform carnivory at that stage where there's still a green base which is where the digestive enzymes are produced or secreted yes we do acclimate them but here in this greenhouse just because the conditions are a little bit more optimal it's cut that time down to about a month from when we receive so it's a drastic change great but we also try to harden plants off more hard i guess rather than soft soft meaning closer to their actual requirements in nature like what they would be subjected to in the wild so the reason for that is that the more tolerant they are of changes in the environment the easier it is for someone to grow at home yeah so hardening off more on the hard side rather than the soft side if that makes sense fascinating yeah no i'm assuming you do hybrids here then yourself yes are there any that you could actually show us yeah uh in this greenhouse we don't have any actually but i can show you plenty more i mean these these are all plants from uh these ones here from our tissue culture lab but these aren't hybrids these are species here these are actually vici the ones that i showed you in the in the beginning there yeah and there's no guarantee that they're going to get the striped peristome so these are clones so these are all identical um so no these this particular um this is from the malayal basin and borneo tissue culture right so yeah that makes sense but that doesn't mean so that's kind of a misnomer tissue culture and micropropagation so i'd say we do more micropropagation than tissue culture even though these plants are technically from tissue culture where we're actually cloning a specific plant but we do a lot of um it would be called asymbiotic seed germination so just starting plants in tissue culture in a sterile environment um to then take them out de-flask them and put them into the greenhouse so that's something you would do with orchids for instance and that technically isn't tissue culture where you're cloning the same plant yeah uh add add infant item like just keep going with it um i don't know if that if that makes sense yeah it does yeah yeah that's fascinating i didn't know the nuance of that and i i love that i'm getting a little tissue culture 101 here trying to think of some other interesting things we have different hot-loving hoyas um we have hoyas in here a few in here yeah i see some yeah finland sony eye this one here um it's actually got some nice little humble oh yeah they're starting there nothing hasn't opened yet yeah opened but getting there do you know what it smells like um i don't i don't remember for this for this particular species actually and you might have to come in at night or early morning hours like really get the scent of it which uh that brings up something for me coming in here at night is sometimes one of my favorite times the greenhouse at large the smells are so much more potent at night i think because the secretions of sugars are much higher at that point in time potentially because the environmental conditions are just right or it's it speaks more to that's when it attracts specific prey yeah which is probably what's actually going on so it's really sweet there's like a really strong sweet sugary smell in here at night and it's just lovely to come in here and just flip on the on the light there's a there's a center way light you can kind of just lights the pathway as you walk through and uh i don't know i just i it's it's therapeutic it's calming it's nice you know coming into the candy shop or whatever confectionary sugar is it i like that yeah so this is the next room yes and it gets a little a little cooler in every room huh it does so this is the picturing the mountain again this is the middle of the mountain as you're kind of moving up in elevation so things are in the low to mid 80s during the day and 63 to 65 or so at night everything is is automated so the the shutters will the exhaust fans will come on uh when this apparatus here um tells it so um when was this greenhouse built which just said about a year and a year a year in chains so it's fresh it's very fresh yeah yep it's great because you could really optimize for it and use a lot of the latest technologies and what works and yeah it's you had mentioned earlier just being more efficient with things in general and that's i mean that's really what this was about to be able to offer us all um you know the ability to set boundaries to be able to walk away and enjoy life in general but to also be able to do the things that we love to do uh with a business um and it definitely makes a difference with the how the plants grow themselves yeah uh and and that allows us to do other things too within the business to you know to continue to be successful and to grow yeah intermediate section there's i mean yeah i can't kind of can't go wrong yeah you know i'm more of a palace right here yeah i have two these both came from cornell uh seed grown got them maybe about five or six years ago now actually it could be within the next year or two that they flower which would be really exciting yeah it takes about about 10 years from seed i think cornell's is about to flower isn't it i haven't been in there okay i mean i'm i'm there yeah every day but uh i actually haven't been in that particular conservatory in a while i imagine it wouldn't surprise me one bit actually if they were i don't know i i look forward to going and taking a whiff so how about in here i see you have some moroids yeah you have some ferns actually you have quite a bit of things in here so a lot of things yeah there's more diversity in this particular greenhouse the middle of the mountain is where a lot of plants want to be a lot of plants want to be and from a business perspective this section is probably what would be easiest for people to grow in their homes because it's more more similar got it to what we have in our houses homes if we can go back here into the jungle further this is a neat plant that's special to me um so naming plants um like giving them a cultivar it's a fun thing i mean it's not something that i was like super wanting to do or really interested in but this was one that i named as warped peristome so the reason for that you can kind of see this this is the peristome yeah and it's just the undulations in that particular periscope even more even more so it's so bizarre um this was actually a seed grown plant from a company we used to import from in australia and it was a small plant and over the years i grew it and these particular characteristics showed up and so it kind of stuck so we published it and that's the the cult of our name it's one that we really enjoy and there's actually a lot of hybrids that have been made or not a lot but several hybrids that we've made with it and this is a male coming into florida and then even when you're crossing it then when you're making a hybrid so i'm assuming you're taking the pollen from the male i'm putting it on a female elsewhere right it still has some of this characteristic that's the hope so with with these plants they are heterozygous it's just like humans so when you have a mom and a dad you're gonna get a pretty big smattering of all of the characteristics throughout the the progeny so the one of the things with the panthers is it does take a while for those characteristics to really show up in a plant and that's kind of one of the issues so the fact that it takes a while for you to see the characteristics that are desirable there's issues with space constraints yeah and so on and so forth you do and you have to it would be nice and i don't think that's gonna happen yeah anytime soon um so yeah uh that that's exactly it and then selecting of those you know the the the plants with the traits and the the qualities that you that you desire or that you know that the horticultural community desires and then continuing to to grow those out and that's one of the interesting things with tissue culture is that so this plant i can really only propagate sexually or asexually i can take cuttings so that's one thing that's great it's just it takes a while it's not really it's not really cost or it is more cost prohibitive that way or you can tissue culture it which is really challenging um because these plants have a relationship with an endogenous fungus and bacteria um so within the tissue and so in tissue culture or micropropagation you need to sterilize the the plant and that kills it yeah right you see there's a there's a balance you can't kill the entire plant right but you also need to remove any pathogens otherwise uh those will take over a a vessel a tissue culture or a micropropagation flask or vessel and then there's sexual reproduction but you don't know what you're going to get that's that's the issue but one nice thing about tissue culture it takes a while or uh this would be tissue culture um taking the seed germinating it with the panties and then cloning those seeds you keep one in tissue culture continue cloning it and but then take it out also and grow it out so you have them growing simultaneously side by side if it ends up being something that's appealing and valuable horticulturally or within the conservation practices in general you can keep that and now you have that and you can produce it as many times as you'd like yeah over and over um and then obviously the converse of that is if it's not appealing or if it's not desirable you don't want to waste time with continuing to propagate it so kind of get rid of or retire that particular clone now are these would be would this be considered like your mother plant is that what you would call this and then are you um i see that your plant mother yeah your stock plant and then are you i see that you're kind of like it's almost a little diorama here with like the the moss and the ferns and everything is that something that you introduced or is that something that just started to grow yeah the latter it just started just started to grow and it looks great i mean it says basically that this is a relatively healthy biome here so it does a couple of things it lets us know that the conditions seem to be more optimal and that's good some of this here actually is the the browning is we have leds those come on when the light levels go below a certain threshold but if the leaves are too close to the lights you get this burning yeah but otherwise the the plants are very happy and the environment is pretty happy and you can really you can tell that by looking at all of the different aspects yeah what's this little guy right here that is a sunrilla it's a unusual little uh they usually get little dots i've seen little dots on them and this is an undescribed species i got from a collector really great coloration yeah oh is this a larger one yeah it is i took a cutting of it and so there's two yeah nice coloration and actually matches nice with a lot of the nepenthes here it does it does and then this is yerba mate the the yeah that is that is what we drink when we drink yerba mate tea yeah it's it's actually a an ilex so a holly uh in the holly family fascinating amazing what else what else oh boy oh my goodness um again here's a another vichy um this one is is uh special to me i've made several hybrids with this this plant uh it's actually flowering again and this is a female that yeah yeah very fuzzy sort of the ovaid of a um uh flower uh before they're actually opening yeah that that's you can tell it's almost like shaped like a football that's uh that's an indicator that it's female versus more of a basketball or round shape that's the male um i'm so curious because you know things that are you know in general house plant trends like variegation or whatever it's something that i typically don't see in the penties is that even something that people look for or yeah not so much it is it's harder to come by probably because those are mutations that happen um with plants that are propagated more frequently or they're more available so nepenthes are are relatively nuanced i mean it's it's there's there's there's it's growing and the competition is actually growing significantly um and i think that it's more of variable of that aspect so the more the plant is around uh there's different types of variegation too whether it's stress related or if it's if it's actually induced induced or if it's like somatic like it's something that's actually going to stay within the plant yeah um like like the variegation here in the in the um monster yeah um here's actually a hybrid one that we made it's a pretty good example with that um as the that beachy eye yeah uh palmore yes that big one there um and here is no no the next one over nope yeah that's okay this is this big guy right here so this is the mother uh this is an offspring i mean if you can see closely here the the striping that's from the female that's from the vicia and then the toothy peristome is from uh edward zianna which uh we'll see a an example of that plant in there and you'll see you'll see why that that really toothy ridgey uh peristome uh where that comes from in the and the father of that and so you know obviously you know your clientele the best and obviously you know like you know more of this this world better so you had mentioned that the the striping the candy cane kind of striping toothy peristomes what else are people looking for maybe the fuzziness fuzziness squatness is a characteristic people really like colorful i mean that's a really important like reds are very common um they may or may not indicate like higher sugar content like that's why it sort of exists or anthocyanin expression there's there's probably a whole slew of different reasons that also is an appealing color to people i mean that's something that we're attracted to or at least i am a red color which is nice in plants um and then also you're kind of like you're hybridizing i just want to say this because obviously this is a a grouping of plants that is probably highly prized taken from the wild there's i'm assuming that some are either threatened endangered or maybe even extinct definitely so is there a promotion within the community to move away from the species or if the species are tissue cultured or whatever or is there a move more towards hybrids is that even looked at as like interesting that's a great question i i think the the issue is that a lot of people in the community or a large portion are very attracted and interested in species um and for that reason there is a there is a pretty big issue with poaching and plants taken from the wilds and tissue culture is a is a path that allows to mitigate that uh to some extent for sure um i think that i think it's important uh um it's important that people are aware of the benefits of tissue culture and what that affords uh the particular species making it more available to more people hopefully you know diminishing the poaching and out of curiosity do you do any of um our native um carnivorous plants or even you know i know like we have utricularia yeah i don't know how hard that is to grow but but but i know some of them are endangered actually so i'm i'm wondering if there's any role that you could play not not putting it on you but like oh no fair enough i mean i i think there's i think there's some amazing uh native uh orchids and carnivorous plants i'm very very into the native orchid plants specifically the superpediums the lady slipper orchids i can show you some utricularia but i actually don't have any of the native ones those are more aquatic what we have here are more terrestrial metrical area or the common name being bladderworts so these are either utricularia and dressii or there may actually be a hybrid between a dressy eye and alpina or alpena this is reniformis um that's cool so these would grow in trees um some of them are could be uh sort of quasi-lithophytic growing in rocks and things of that nature they need high high moisture uh content very clean water their traps are are actually in the in the soil versus you know something that you can see like within the panthers um see if i can gently tease it out yeah oh yeah look at that so there's little on some of them they're not producing it as much here oh so that's not that's not it those are those are where they would come off they're typically a little they're little round balls um that you would see uh they're little sacks that you'll see so they they mostly eat insects that are in the soil though correct yeah uh within the soil rolling around and then all of a sudden yeah uh insects like nematodes things like that um you can kind of see it's really tiny and there's better examples of of the alpine or alpena in the in the next greenhouse where you can see some more let's keep looking around see if we can find those fiddleheads are like bright yellow i know it's so bizarre it looks like it's like spray painted yeah let's see what can we find in here looks like you're growing chives out of there i know make a nice salad yeah i don't see any on this um i mean look at this guy right here too how he's these are just like kind of growing in a little uh crown that's cool that's another australian endemic uh cephalotus um meaning head yeah and i guess they kind of look like a head it looks more like a little baby bjorn thing i don't know maybe because it's shaped in a crown yeah grow in a crowd it does it's it's very basil rosette uh behavior yeah it'll just continue it sends up little little uh runners that keep uh popping up and stolens i guess it's more stoloniferous than than than runners but um oh no it wouldn't be stolen they would be runners it would be really now i'm thinking from a marketing fly somebody could take this but like making a nepenthe's baby bjorn so your your kid is sitting in a panties i just think it's so like sick and funny at the same time i agree there there was uh so he used to go to the new england carnivorous place being digested yeah don't worry they had a photography thing where like a green screen at the new england carnival plant society yeah many years ago where um they'd take a picture of you and and it would superimpose you inside of a cephalotus picture it was pretty funny with like a little version of you going um this is a our propagation bench so each greenhouse has a bench that specifically has a mist system that comes on in the whole greenhouse gets watered with a with an automated mist system but this one specifically comes on you'll see it probably within the period of time that that we're in this room okay for for cutting so basically to reduce the transpiration uh um the humidity is much higher here right and i see that you're like slicing the leaves to help prevent some of that transpiration exactly even though you have a nice humid environment even even though it makes it even it makes it even easier for them to root we do use a rooting hormone that's primarily iba based which most rooted powdered rooting hormones are and then do you find that the rooting hormone really does have you ever tried non and with and if you so some nepenthes uh will root much easier than others that is definitely uh that's definitely a thing yeah i i haven't just because i haven't really toyed around with it or experimented too much uh i've experimented with different methods and ways of doing the cuttings um so you know whether it's cutting the the actual tissue underwater to prevent embolisms um that definitely seems to help significantly um but using or not using i just i guess i haven't i haven't really done that but but sort of anecdotally watching other people in the community do it there's people who will just stick it in water some of them and they'll they'll root that way so the issue with that is that the the the change from water to soil uh those roots have adapted specifically to that kind of of an environment exactly they don't really transfer really well so they end up kind of losing those root hairs or anything right yeah it's a very different route it's also seen in tissue culture so roots that that come out of out of tissue culture especially with the oaks that we're working with it's it's a very thick tap root uh and then within two to three weeks after it gets this really filamentous like fibrous root system uh that you don't see in vitro um which is interesting i'm thinking when it's in tissue culture and it's like all of a sudden has to develop this like fibrous root system it's like it didn't have to work before yeah now it has to work you have to go out and make a living you you hit it you hit it right on the head of the nail there that's exactly that's exactly what's going on you're going from the perfect environment yeah all the nutrients that they need perfect humidity no pests uh yeah and then they have to come out here into this terrifying world so with the with the tissue culture so a lot of these plants actually came out of the lab so this is a kind of an interesting uh species nepenthes mapuloensis it's a more recent discovery so we received seed we germinated the seed in vitro um and then once we had a small plantlet with past the cotyledon so basically you got a few actual true leaves we then put it onto a media that that has a pgrs or plant growth regulators certain hormones that get the specific cells to uh become undifferentiated rather than differentiated so basically there are specific cells in a plant that uh that are told to do one thing uh versus another i'll be a leaf exactly yeah exactly if it's undifferentiated it could be a root or a anything yeah yeah exactly so like totipotent like it's it's it's it's cells that can can do what you sort of tell it to do at that point um and so that's the process which where we produce more shoots um so more plantlets and then then it would go onto a media that has a rooting hormone and then you get your roots and and then we would actually put it on depending on on the plant but we would put it onto another media that allows it to further uh further grow and and get some size and then they they come out here uh they come out here to acclimate we will put a dome over it to keep the humidity high initially and then we take that off and tell them good luck and those that make it which most do i would say probably 90 or so 90 to 95 make it here's a here's a like we were talking about variegation like this is a nepenthes that i'm not sure if this is stress related it probably is but it actually seems to be relatively consistent right um so we'll see if it's you know chimera or if this is if this is going to be something that will stay true yeah which would be really interesting because that was a hybrid that we made here interesting um there are plenty of other clones yeah um that we have but that one seems to be doing this particular behavior so yeah we'll see this is another plant um i'm a big fan of this is and a lot of hybrids have been made i can show you um it's actually about the flower again so this is a female this is a vci low eye oh yes it's the it's the toilet bowl yeah exactly exactly and and a characteristic uh feature which you can barely see i don't know if you can get the hairs on the lid that's a common a common uh it's almost like armpit hairs on the on the underside of the the lid or the oprah column um and it will produce and exit it which low eye which i'll show you an example of one in the highland section that is that is one of the characteristics is the the hairs on the on the upper column the the lid uh and then an exit that forms right it's like cotton candy almost it's sweet but it's kind of funky it's bacterial so it encourages the shrew right it's a sugar that comes in it wants to lick the sugars it takes a poop exactly it relieves itself it sits right on it like it's like imagine going in and sitting on a toilet in the reverse way uh and eating something that has a has a laxative in it and uh and it's got sugar it's got a nutrient load so it's brilliant before you know it you take a load off i mean maybe we need to uh design our toilet bowls that way for people i mean nature does it so i know maybe maybe mimicking that lick the laxative on the back of the toilet biomimicry is a thing i mean that's uh that's it that's a real thing um so yeah making several different hybrids one of there's a couple over here i think that was actually the reason why i went over here and then in the nervousness of all of this i forgot um so this is uh this is one of my favorite hybrids that uh we've made uh this is the vci low eye as the mother and then edward ziana which will go into the highland section to take a look at the father again on this one it just the colors are really great there's a lot of different clones that we have of this this one was from seed so this one i germinated on soil i didn't germinate it in tissue culture and uh it's so slender it is very slender which is which is unusual when you take a look at the girth of the bti no no but so other other uh one of the things that i really enjoy is seeing other customers other growers grow their representative plants out yeah and some of the clones i'm like wow that's amazing that's incredible and definitely some of our some of our customers grow them better than we do it's amazing it's so great to see this is another one uh with that same vci low eye this one however is with campanullata which is a lowland plant that has a really wide almost like frog mouthed uh peristome so it's penul i think of like bells yeah exactly that's it that's exactly that's exactly the where the the name is coming from there on that this one doesn't quite have the characteristics that i was hoping for um but i really like the i really like the colors so it didn't get that the the companion uh shape there is one over here and then we'll go one last one and then we can go into the highland section um let's see if it's got a good representative here so you you can see the more uh frog oh yeah bell almost shape where it starts wide and then it kind of goes down uh this one is low eye by campagnolata i love the pixelation in that it's really cool it's really quite stunning that probably is also one of my personal favorite uh characteristics there's a there's a pixelation on this one in particular that is sort of like i don't know what you would call it oh yeah oh it's all right it happens did it just pray well it snapped it's still fine it's just it bent kind of the wrong way when i think we're going to hit an animal on the road when we're driving i do that that is one of my i always i'm terrified about that and one reason why i prefer not to drive in general yeah no that pixelation is so pretty it is it's really it's like camo oh it feels so much better it gets a lot cooler in [Music] here oh it really feels a lot better to me well you could tell that you have like you stack more plants in here so you say it gives you a reason to spend more time here i guess here's a here's a funny i guess kind of story about the the old greenhouse i was i was not able so in new york state upstate new york it's it's it's hard to get the temperature range like so a portion of the year the winter it's easier to keep plants under highland conditions because you're really not trying to cool that's the hardest thing to do you're really just heating things up so you can you can keep a greenhouse in the winter time under highland conditions it's the summer time that really is a struggle where it's really humid and also can be very hot and muggy humid um and so cooling is really difficult you can't use the evaporative cooling which is what these are they help a little bit they can drop the temperature maybe five to ten degrees that wet wall that feels pretty significant though already five to ten degrees that does make a big difference but then at night time it shrinks even more because it's the saturation it's it's so the dew point is so uh uh so low at that point yeah that you can't drop the temperature really uh maybe maybe two degrees or so so that's where the geothermal has given us the opportunity to cool things down to what the temperatures needed what i did in the old greenhouse was a grower a very well respected known grower in the nepenthes community had published a article on how to basically retrofit a chest freezer into a grow setup for alpine tropical plants and so it's basically taking a chest freezer i think i got the first one on craigslist or something like that and you basically take the top off get a plexiglas to fit on the top and then you plug in the the cord into a day night thermostat so it's got a little light sensor on it so it knows when it's light out and then when it's not it kicks on to cool so you can basically you can set the temperature parameters for whatever you need during the day so it'll keep it in the 70s and then at night when the when the light goes uh goes on it kicks on and runs those parameters so i if i wanted it at 50 degrees the chest freezer would cool it to 50 degrees so that was the resonation for you that was that was great it was wonderful um but a chest freezer uh doesn't allow you to do a lot i mean you can't grow many plants right you can buy a bunch of chest freezers but then it also becomes cost prohibitive with the electric bill and so on so forth right so you moved from chest freezer to this to this which which was really great there there were a lot of uh yeah just was very grateful to be able to have this opportunity and that might be part of the reason why you see so many plants in here is because it's definitely my favorite uh space and we've also moved up the mountain top then right yeah okay uh are these considered like i mean can they be considered alpine subalpine there's there's no thing it's like alpine tropical would be it would be yeah like um so this would be above the tree line yeah some of them some of them would be would be maybe not quite above the tree line okay but so it'd be more like scrub montane uh for us so not quite uh alpine you're right um so the temperatures i mean they can they can get close to freezing um so some of these plants uh experience nights in the in the upper 30s um look at this accordion right here that's the edwardian so that's the father now i understand why you want him to be the father of all your little nepenthes babies as as many as i can i mean it's very attractive there's a lot of there's a lot of uh toothy plants so this is macrophylla this is another really great bornean species found uh on uh mount trusmari and so one of my favorite hybrids happens to be a natural hybrid between low eye which is this point here we also talked about the shrew toilet um so these two hybridize look at these yeah the bristles the hairs are just very big armpit hair now it's like a brillo pad it's like a brillo pad you're right so when these two cross you get this oh wow look how deep red that is yeah that's like a deep red throat so this is a newly opened trap where you can see things are a little bit lighter there's the striping on the peristome yeah these are very woody i mean they're very uh woody tough um and then this is a more mature one so otherworldly it really is yeah this is a nepenthes velosa also found in borneo uh several mountain peaks again very toothy this one's really challenging to grow i've had several over the years this is the one i've had for the the longest they really need that nighttime drop in temperature they're really picky i mean all of these really are but this one seems to be the most sensitive do they um understand morphologically why they have this kind of um you know accordion fold is it not not fully i i think there's some theories about uh again the the ability for moisture to condense on these uh and actually sort of have water go inward beyond that i i'm not sure i've read too much on why that adaptation really uh exists it's one of the one of the things i'm most fascinated with in the panties is the food web relationships so the different organisms that actually live within and around nepenthes uh so the the traps do produce a digestive enzyme it is very acidic it's something comparable to to our stomach acids uh and yet there are other organisms that actually live and survive and thrive and reproduce and uh you know coexist uh so there's there's some really interesting mutualistic yeah relationships for sure and something that if i ever went back to school um i think that would be something that i would i would really like to to explore grad school project i always mention grad school projects so you don't for someone else you know somebody else i'd love to read about it i'd love to learn but exactly maybe for somebody else yeah yeah this one's pretty too it has like this like kind of creamy white center yeah really deep red yep trap uh pulchra it's uh like the like the word pulchritudinous so beautiful like uh that i mean you kind of were drawn right to to the the features that uh sort of are described in its name yeah because it's so contrasty you know what i mean it is like it draws your eyes to it yeah yeah i agree here's another uh hybrid that we made here um so it's that is the father and then glandular the pathy's glandular is the female so the mother so nepenthes produce polymorphic pitchers or trimorphic so they produce sort of three different pictures at different points along the plant as it grows so you get the basal pitchers so these ones that are down closer to the ground see if i can get a good representative i mean that's a good one it's as good as i guess it's quasi quasi-intermediate um and one of the ways you can tell basal pitchers typically have wings or it's a it's a more pronounced the further down so this is more intermediate actually where they kind of disappear you can still kind of see the the vestiges there let me see if i can find a nepenthes that has a really good example of uh yeah the one right right there the vga so this is a highland vti actually but you can see the the the wings and they're very pronounced and they go right up the right up the side of the picture so that's that's one of the ways you can tell a basal pitcher versus an intermediate pitcher which is going to be somewhere along the middle where you'll still get you'll still get some of the uh wings i don't know if you can find a good example so they just don't need those wings yes for whatever reason yeah for whatever reason it probably has more to do with like species-specific insect prey attraction so these plants actually are are visually seen by insects in a very different way from how we see them using uv light so there's there's definitely triggers within the plant where we can't see uh but the insects do and i've seen some of the the photographs of these plants under uv light it's pretty amazing and and the wings really really show up on a very stark contrast compared to the rest of the picture so that may speak more specifically to specific insects so more ground dwelling insects are probably going to be attracted to the the lower pitchers some uh specific more uh you know uh flight bound insects probably for the intermediate and then uppers are devoid uh or void of the wings and these are these are all uppers here if you want to try something that's tasty and surprising just take your finger on those droplets you can see those little black dots those are the glands hence the name glandular not as sweet as i thought is it not that sick but bye but i have a very like high speed um no no i hear him yeah try try a couple of them this one's a little gooier yeah that might be sweeter yeah that one's way sweeter than the one i just got and at night time it's really pronounced yeah i mean it's it's quite amazing and then the smell is really this one's pretty good yeah uh nighttime is much better uh it's really sweet oh yeah it's very florally very floral and sweet yeah you know i'm i'm just wondering like you know i'm seeing this one right here which is like a very tubby brown one you know probably at towards the end of its life yes exactly but what what is in the cellular walls of these are not making it totally dissolve itself you know what i mean like it's kind of like your stomach right it is but what's in your stomach line like what's in this that you know doesn't make it like it's just holding that water like a cup and it and it lasts for such a long time you know because it's such a good energy to produce that i mean the the probably the chitin in in the actual tissue is is one of the reasons why like the woodier the pitchers the more durable they are but there's also a waxy coating on the inside so there's actually wax crystals kind of stacked on top of each other going down certain zones yeah that means um and the further down you go um they're i think more pronounced yeah this this example here that you pointed out feels almost almost yeah maybe some of them overlapping or not definitely yeah this one here is actually filled up with water so that that actually probably wouldn't be as acidic and as uh you know caustic yeah um as as the pitcher is the way it's designed to be so the way it's designed to be is the the fluid only fills up you know maybe maybe up to here water coming in this this lid actually prevents water from coming in and diluting it yeah okay um that's really the only purpose of the lid uh there's probably other reasons too for attracting insects they do it does secrete sugars underneath there often a lot of the lids are really sweet um and so this area here is if you were to feel the inside you could feel it's really waxy downward pointing teeth the reason for that is to prevent to prevent things from getting out i thought he was joking no not really yeah yeah i feel how waxy it is oh yeah it does have downward pointing teeth oh i was like is he being serious or like you know no no junkie i actually was like oh this is uncomfortable this is being caught on camera stay tuned because we'll have more of flora collaborative in some upcoming episodes and if you find yourself coming back to these videos consider liking subscribing and hitting the notifications bell as that helps the channel grow and allows us to produce more great botanical content like this if you're looking to round out your plant knowledge then have a look at our suite of online courses including house plant basics the houseplant master class 125 houseplant care spreadsheet and troubleshoot your houseplants and if you haven't heard yet one percent of our google adsense revenue on this channel will be devoted to plant conservation which is just one way we're giving back to the plants we love in the meantime you can also check out our newest channel covering our new homestead on outdoor gardening and more over at flock finger lakes see you in the next video you

Channel: Summer Rayne Oakes

Views: 68,377

Rating: 4.9521532 out of 5

Keywords: Summer Rayne Oakes, Homestead Brooklyn, Plant One On Me, plants, houseplants, indoor plants, garden, house plants, houseplant care, carnivorous plants, carnivorous plant tour, carnivorous plant greenhouse tour, how to care for carnivorous plants, nepenthes, nepenthes care, how to care for nepenthes, how to water nepenthes, watering carnivorous plants, Florae Collaborative, nepenthes greenhouse, plants of Borneo, Drosera, drosera plant care, deadly plants, sundews, sundew plant

Id: EL_YDXq37oY

Length: 51min 9sec (3069 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021