Trent, Joe, quite happy to see how interest in these species is slowly increasing now that always more people understand how little we know about those species that once we thought common and obvious (anamensis, thorelii, kampotiana etc).
The color variations of N. viking go from deep pink to deep red, but the red color of the tendril seems to be one of the peculiarities with all the specimens.
This plant, together with the so called N. "Kraburi" (That's the name I think) has remained unknown until - I'm happy to say also thanks to my website -until some thai people and some growers realized that they were growing something new, something that is not thorelii ...
You could also ask why N. smilesii has remained unknown up to now...while everybody is growing it! the reason is the same (you can read more on my site): there's so much confusion, not so many species, not so interesting and in a so hard to explore territory, that people prefer to spend their time trying to solve problems with new attractive highland species from Borneo and Malaysia...
I can understand their point, but I was attracted by Indochina right because nobody knows anything about its pitcher plants...and there's still a lot to do...
when you talk about the site owner I think you mean the site with N. viking and kraburi...I'm in contact with that person and in the future every news will appear on nepenthesofthailand...(I need visitors, you know...
))
just...don't think he knows much more than what you read on that page about thorelii etc...
Trent, on your website the N. kampotina is not exactly a mistake. That's What M. Cheek and me call N. smilesii, wrongly named N. kampotiana and N. anamensis (with "wrongly" I mean that those two names are valid but not accepted, as they were given after that the same plants had already been named...read the N. smilesii chronology on my website).
But It's less wrong than saying it's N. thorelii.
anamensis, kampotiana or smilesii, we are talking about the same plant, just to be clear. Wheter or not anamensis is more correct than smilesii, at the moment is up to which "school" you follow...
What you call thorelii I think is a hybrid (well, you say it's a hybrid actually
. And this is the same "mistake" also Exotica Plants did (with thorelii, smilesii and maybe viking), to produce a hybrid with plants we still didn't identify for sure. This leads to even more confusion and we call "thorelii" a hybrid that doesn't even have a thorelii inside!
The plant you have could be a hybrid between N. smilesii and viking, or between smilesii and thorelii....but we'll never be sure with a hybrid. We need to see the original plants that were crossed... I'd really like that, if you could...Thanks!
Trent, I'll also try to do what I can to have some of those in vitro plants, as I want to see them on the large scale market: that's the only way to save nepenthes from extinction.
But to deal with that country can be quite complicate...
cheers,
Marcello