What's new
TerraForums Venus Flytrap, Nepenthes, Drosera and more talk

Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Joseph Clemens

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
In about 1968, when I was living in Westminster, California. I was an avid organic gardener, In the back yard, I had an organic vegetable garden, not very large (about 10' x 40'), but it contained a large variety of plants. I had two bee hives atop a grape arbor. I also kept a rooster in one corner, a pair of angora rabbits in a set of rabbit hutches in the center, back of the yard, and a large, concrete sink on an iron stand on one side of the back yard, near the south gate. I had the sink filled with water, that was pea soup green with algae, and I used it to breed tropical fish. In my bedroom, I had aquaria (about six of various sizes), total of about 200 gallons. The aquaria were set up for keeping and raising tropical fish, and I had a wide assortment. I had a small, high-capacity, piston air pump, which provided aeration to all the indoor aquaria.

I had also built a small, Wardian case (2' W x 4'L x 4'H), in the center of the back yard, under the shade of a small elm tree. I kept my growing orchid collection in the Wardian case. I was a devoted member of the American Orchid Society, and its local chapter, the Orange County Orchid Society. My parents would drive me to the meetings, then after meetings I would walk a few blocks to a branch of the local public library. Sometimes the library would close before I was picked up, and I would wait in the garden center of the Builder's Emporium store, which was behind the library. So, one day, while looking through the garden center, I noticed something I had not seen before - Venus Flytraps in plastic bags. They had their leaves and roots trimmed off, and were in moist peat moss, but there were nice color photographs of the plants printed on the card, stapled to their bags. The company that produced these was "Insectivorous Botanical Gardens", a now defunct nursery in Wilmington, N.C. They weren't very expensive, and one package contained three VFT plants, but I still needed to save my allowance and babysitting money, in order to buy them. I also wrote to the company to ask questions about the plants, and unintentionally discovered that they also sold other CP. I killed many of my first VFT plants, but soon learned how to care for them - though I wouldn't have good success with them, until much later. I also learned of other CP, in particular Drosera capillaris, Sarracenia rubra and Sarracenia flava. These were my first, after the VFT. I had much better success with them than I had, at first, with the VFT.

Soon I was to relocate to the mountain town of Waynesboro, Virginia, and expand my CP education/experience when I located various Sphagnum bogs, while hiking in the woods behind my house, there. (more on that later)

Through the years I've had opportunity to experience/observe various CP in North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Michigan, Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. I'll try to share some highlights of the CP I've seen, and grown, in this thread, and especially as it concerns the Sarracenia and Darlingtonia I've seen and grown.
 
Last edited:
Ah, Builder's Emporium. At the one near me you could at times find Sarracenia purpurea and Darlingtonia californica in addition to Dionaea muscipula. The local Woolworth's sometimes had Darlingtonia and Venus Flytraps. The Flytraps they sold were three plants in a small plastic terrarium (death cube) made to resemble a greenhouse. The Dionaea I got from Builder's Emporium was in a small white pot with a bit of perlite in the bottom and live Sphagnum moss. This was in 1967-68. I had the same plant in the same pot with the same Sphagnum until 1980-81 when my parents let it dry out while I was away in graduate school. The Sarracenia and Darlingtonia did not fare as well and lasted only a few months.
 
I was having a conversation yesterday with a coworker about how people before the internet found different types of cp's this pretty cool to hear how people discovered cp's
 
This was a really interesting story of how you found CPs! Mine is similar except includes deathcubes and less hiking through bogs, and overall less exciting xD
 
Through the years I've had opportunity to experience/observe various CP in North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Michigan, Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. I'll try to share some highlights of the CP I've seen, and grown, in this thread, and especially as it concerns the Sarracenia and Darlingtonia I've seen and grown.

Yes, Please continue!

How much easier things have become due to the internet! I feel like I grew up in a kind of golden age for cp's, very lucky. Local home improvement stores carried "death cubes," but the old style ones...in the sealed hard plastic cases. In them they had different kinds of Sarracenia, Nepenthes, Darlingtonia, Drosera, VFTs. Anybody else remember when they had variety, large ones with 3 different types of carnivorous plants in it? There were/are internet sites that carried a ton more variety for sale if you had a bit more $ to spend. Internet forums and growing websites. Now you can almost get anything, shipped to your door, whenever. There is currently no local CP society here, but online I was able to figure out a great spot near enough to me to go hiking and was able to find Sarracenia minor, some dews and utricularia.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top