S. flava var. ornata picture

[jorick]

Well this is one of my new ones, just bought it today from the Belgian cp society. A nicely colored S. flava var. ornata



And a nice shot of the lid.



Hope you enjoy the pics.

[Michael Catalani]

Thats a beauty of a plant.

I do not believe its true S. flava though. The smaller lid, roundish mouth, the back lid flap, and coloration tend to make me believe it has S. leucophylla in it. Not that thats a bad thing, because plants such as S. flava x (S. flava x S. leucophylla) are very large and beautiful plants.

[jorick]

Well that's interesting. It is a seed grown plant but I don't know much about it's history. I had already noticed that the plant was very colorful for a pure ornata, but I assumed that it was natural variety since it is a seed grown plant or that it had some cuprea or rubricorpa in it.
I think that the best way would to know whether it is a hybrid or not is to wait for a flower, If there is Leucophylla in it, then it will probably be visible in the flower.

[pinglover]

Open pollination, throws us all for a loop every once in a while. Your plant is absolutely stunning regardless of its parentage.

[jorick]

Alright a small update on the plant...

The plant came out of a greenhouse and it seems that it didn't got enough light to totally color up. Right now it is in my bog in full sun, and the thing is that now the plant is starting to get a nice dark red color, it's getting harder and harder to see the red veins. So this means that it definitely isn't flava var. ornata but I'd like to give the plant a name, so would it be correct to name it S. x moorei ?

[pinglover]

Unfortunately, you are trying to stick a square peg into a round hole by attempting to give your plant a name. Your plant certainly does not appear to be S. flava var cuprea to me and I strongly suspect it is a by-product of open pollination. Their parentage of your plant is not known therefore you will not be able to name it anything other that possibly S. flava x open pollination.

As far as maintaining the red coloration, I use Tannic Tea on all of the S. flava var cuprea, rubricorpora, atropurpurea, nigropurpurea, and well basically anything with red to include the courtii and the alata red/black. I used to use a 2.5 gallon water jug and added 10 bags of black tea and let it sit outside. One can recap their jug with the tea bag strings hanging over the edge and doing this makes it easy to pull them out. After 3 days, I used to take the jug and fish out the tea bags. I would wring the excess from the tea bags into the jugs (mustn't lose one drop) and toss them in my composter. Then I watered the plants I wanted to hold their red. New pitchers seemed to color up nicely within a very short period of time. That was then and now I use a 35 gallon rubbermaid garbage can. It has about 30 gallons of rain water in it and 180 bags of black tea that I use for some sarracenia.

[rsivertsen]

Take a close look at the under side of the lids in those plants to see if there are any small hairs; S. flava has no hairs under the lid. You image shows some indication that there may be small hairs under the lid, but I would suggest a 4X jewelers’ loupe to get a closer look.

[jorick]

Thanks rsivertsen
I just took a look at my plant, and there are definitely hairs at the underside of the lid and it has a velvet feel. My guess is that the hairs are around 0.5 mm long ( if this is useful )

I have requested information at the Belgian cp society ( the seller ) and as far as they know it is pure flava. They will contact the person who sow the seeds to find out whether he knows more about it or not.

So right now it is sure that it is an hybrid. At least I'm getting this far with the ID of the plant....

[jorick]

Alright, thanks to Iwein from the Belgian cps, I can now give my plant a correct name. The guy who grew the plants confirmed that it is a form of S. x moorei: S. flava var. ornata x leucophylla.

[Michael Catalani]

Well, I know it wasnt exactly what you thought you were purchasing, but this is and will be a very very nice plant to own.

[Dave Evans]

What I have noticed about some of the red coloration of Sarracenia is they don't really need more tannin to produce red color, but rather adding tannin improves the quality of the soil, replacing some of what the peat has lost over time. It is good for all the plants, not just those with a lot of red in the leaves. The red clones seem to build up their anthocyanin over time and they pull it back out of the leaves before shedding them at the end of the year, and reuse it again next spring. When divisions are made, they tend to loose some of the coloration which then has to be built back up. I do not understand why this happens... Anyway, even if you self pollinate a "pure" variety of S. flava, only some seedlings will be able to be assigned in that same variety. To me, they are more like naturally occurring cultivars which need to vegetatively reproduced to maintain the same color form/pattern.

Dr. Donald Schnell has managed to confuse people about these "varieties". They are more like color forms and tend to all be mixed together within the same and different individual plants.

(just like S. p. p. forma heterophylla, which is caused by a recessive gene, while the different red patterns in S. flava seem to be neither recessive or dominate. This difference is why you can make pure heterophylla seed. However, it better to out cross first, making heterozygous plants which will be normal looking in the first generation, but carry the heterophylla gene)

I have seen that they occasionally occur by themselves, but it appears this pattern was caused by humans when they box off different plots and divide land with roads and drainage ditches; as well as massive un-natural plantings of non-native trees (which are allowed to grow so thick, they become walls); and other methods of property line demarcation. If all of those barriers people have made were removed, these individual pockets of plants would be one continuous spectrum of different color forms.

For example; in an area of (location removed for safety extremely rare color forms), Florida you can find a couple of pockets which are mostly segregated by color form, but then you will also find several pockets (locations) where they are all mixed together and all of these have man-made barriers, even those on "protected" land. There are fewer barriers on protected land as it tends not to have been made into individual plots. All of these locations occur within a few kilometers of each other, you can literally walk from one to the next by walking up the road a couple of "blocks" or by crossing the road.

S. flava atropurpurea has consistently shorter leaves than other varieties. Perhaps making all that purple costs the plant more, or maybe it got to be that purple by borrowing some genes from S. purpurea. I find it very interesting (and telling) that certain color forms (which are named as varieties) of S. flava only occur where the ranges of S. flava and S. rosea (along with S. luecophylla) over lap.

jorick said:

Well that's interesting. It is a seed grown plant but I don't know much about it's history. I had already noticed that the plant was very colorful for a pure ornata, but I assumed that it was natural variety since it is a seed grown plant or that it had some cuprea or rubricorpa in it.
I think that the best way would to know whether it is a hybrid or not is to wait for a flower, If there is Leucophylla in it, then it will probably be visible in the flower.