The Ryno Pen

^{As Rolf Harris often says: can you see what it is yet?}

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^{Why, ’tis Drosera Capensis, to be sure!}

I bought a cape sundew about a year ago, and it’s going just fine. As long as they’re kept reasonably swampy and their water is relatively clean, it’s almost impossible to kill ‘em.

As a matter of fact, I left one on a relatively cold, wet, office window ledge in the middle of a Canberra winter, and my colleagues all watered it, to the point where a mould rotted the middle out of the plant. I thought it was dead.

Wrong! The leaf ends took root and formed clone plants. Like I said: virtually unkillable.

The original purchase was three adult plants crammed very close together. A few seeds had taken root around the base, forming younger, satellite plants. The colony survived splitting-up and repotting, so all but two plants have been given to friends, for purposes of Kiddie Amusement.

^{My two mature plants, soaking up the sun.}

^{A number of fallen seeds have taken root, too. The small red points of this tiny specimen are scarcely taller than the moss it’s growing in.}

Flower-stalks are coming out again. That is about the third time this year.

I love the flowers: they’re so delicate, and they open in sequence along the spike, maximising the chances of cross-pollination.

Photography (or at  least photography as amateurish as mine) can’t do justice to the main beauty of the sundew, though. All the little glue-blobs shine in the sun like tiny jewels…

That’s it for now, O Both My Readers™.

LATE EDIT:

This little species, Drosera Spatulata, is most likely the sort that grew in the yard of a house I lived in on the Queensland coast, many years ago.

^{Spatulata picture from Hiromichi Matsuo’s web site}

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Photography, carnivorous plants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.