Southern Hemisphere drosera in the wild !

[minimao]

Hi everyone,
So I went into the Coromandel forest yesterday here in beautiful New Zealand and thought some of you might like to see a few of my pics of our sundews!

[hcarlton]

Very nice! Any ID's? I might be able to guess a couple, but most are hard to tell.

[minimao]

Oct 31, 2016 1:04:37 GMT hcarlton said:

Very nice! Any ID's? I might be able to guess a couple, but most are hard to tell.

There were Drosera binata, Drosera auriculata and Drosera spatulata and pygmaea I believe. Thanks! It is such a lovely spot!!

[hcarlton]

From that leaf I would have thought multifida over binata, but on the other hand the whole complex is a mess... would agree on the auriculata though. And, I think this might be the first time I've seen pics of the NZ spatulata.

[minimao]

Oh yes could be, hard to tell as I didn't see any mature multis.Glad you liked the pics!

[leeb]

Drosera binata in New Zealand is very variable; I have seen small plants with just two points on each leaf, larger plants with 4 to 8 points are common enough and a giant plant at the Kopuatai Dome swamp had over 20 points on each leaf.
The plant was growing up through other vegetation and had only two or three leaves on the plant and the leaf petiole was over a metre long, the leaves were on top of the other vegetation at my hip height.

Unlike in Australia there doesn't seem to be consistent geographic variation in leaf size and complexity in New Zealand, although the only D. binata plant I have seen at altitude on the desert road in the central North Island was very small.

Older plants just tend to get bigger and have more complex leaves if the growing conditions are good, and if growing through vegetation the plant puts all their energy into producing a few leaves of large size.

LeeB.

[minimao]

Cool, thanks for the info LeeB !!

[leeb]

That's okay,
it's always good to see pictures of the local carnivorous plants.

LeeB.