The Big Day Out

Phew!! All 180 plant pictures all resized, saved and uploaded onto 3 separate Flickr accounts. Thank goodness I prepared them all beforehand. The train journey was plain murder. At the end of it, however, I had no doubts at all that all 10 hours of transport was definitely well-spent. I'm not putting up all the pics I have though, that'll bore you all to death. Just click on the pics to get a larger version. Let's start with the train station!


The inside of Glasgow Central station, it's got lovely hotels jutting out from one of the walls. It's definitely a lovely station, after seeing all the rest. The entire ceiling is made of glass.

Next, the hotel room. It's quite a lovely place, with excellent room furnishings - just the kind of thing I like! And quite a steal for the price. However, they didn't provide any toiletries (except for the usual very fluffy towels, soaps and shampoos and paper), so that was a bit of a nasty shock. I arrived without a shaver, and came back to Glasgow looking very messy indeed.



Dream meal - Thai vegetable curry with rice, a huge baked potato with cheese, and 2 beers. =)Got it delivered from the restaurant next door, and prices are really reasonable - the soft drinks are just 15 pence more than the ones I get in the hall. The beers were really very good, you can taste the fruitiness. I guess it's a nice change, after drinking bullshit like Tiger.


Sunset as seen from my hotel room window. It's around 11pm, and very nice peachy sky.


Meeting the man himself .. Mike and I in the Sarracenia flava greenhouse! Had a really good impromptou lesson from the master himself, and I'm surprised he doesn't own more of the original Adrian Slack cultivars. Slack's a personal friend of his and a hero of mine, and definitely one of the world's best Sarracenia hybridisers. He's now incapacitated, unfortunately, and the price of his second book has shot up sky-high. I received it as a gift from a lovely CPer from Ireland, and somehow misplaced it. Shit. It now fetches a staggering S$2000, no shit.



The works - 3 of his 4 greenhouses!


Looking very lost in one of his greenhouses. I would too, if I had that many plants.


If you think my DIY deioniser and water barrel are quite something to provide pure water for these plants, think again. He's got 16 of these all over his garden, and 4 gigantic 600L black tubs hidden right at the back of the garden. The gutters on the house and greenhouse roofs are filtered and sent by gravity into these water butts, from which he manually gets the rainwater out.



OK, you've got to blow up this pic to see it properly. See the droobles of nectar around the rim at the mouth? This is Sarracenia leucophylla, it's not quite at its best at this time of the year - the most spectacular pitchering occurs around autumn.


For Kenneth .. a field of HOT PINK. A new, very nicely-furry hybrid.


Dionaea muscipula "Spider" - an upright form of flytrap.


The UK National Collection of Dionaea


Dionaea muscipula "G14" - this particular clone has been infected by a peculiar virus that causes a variegated colouration inside the trap.


Sarracenia oreophila in full bloom. OOOOOH! This is the one species I've had a 100% mortality rate with. They are just too difficult to grow. Being a montane species, they require hot dry summers and only pitcher during a cool winter period.


Beautiful "weeds" - those tiny little white flowers you see? Those are Utricularia bisquamata "Betty's Bay", also a kind of carnivorous plant. The traps are hidden underground, but those flowers are just so sweet! A very nice kind of weed to have, and it's all over the place invading the pots! I'm going to get me some of that stuff.


THE definitive collection of red Sarracenia flavas. All these look pretty much the same, but they are subtly different and all are from different localities. Yeah, only freaks (me) will go for the plants' locations.


Nice pic of Sarracenia flava var. rubricorpa, kissed by just a touch of sun.


Adrian Slack's famous and elusive clone of S.flava var. rubricorpa, cv. 'Burgundy'. Look at the rich, wine-red colouration!


Sarracenia leucophylla 'Tarnok' - a mutated form that produces normal-looking pitchers but only shows its true self when it flowers. These multi-petalled flowers are, unfortunately, sterile.


Ahh ... extreme rarity. Only 4 people have this unimposing, normal and drab-looking plant in cultivation (I'm hoping to be next on the stupid waiting list). This is an all-green mutant of Sarracenia purpurea ssp. venosa, var. luteola.


Another rarity - Sarracena leucophylla 'Schnell's Ghost', named after Don Schnell from the states. This is an anthocyanin-free form of S.leucophylla, which means it contains no red pigmentation at all. Not to be confused with var. alba, which is if anything even rarer, since it contains no pigmentation whatsoever except for green.


Adrian Slack's legacy - another elusive (and not so attractive to most non-CPers) cultivar. Sarracenia x excellens "Loch Ness". Most S.x excellens have brick-red flowers derived from its both parents S.minor and S.leucophylla, but oddly enough this particular cultivar produces yellow flowers. The pic below shows both colour forms of the flowers.


Drosera slackii - one of those nasty South African sundews that simply don't grow in Singapore.


Sarracenia x 'Copper Vase' - an exquisite shape and colouration on this rare cultivar.


Sarracenia x 'Red Ruffes' - photos simply don't do this plant justice! Plant originally from Dean Cook (USA), who incidentally was the first person ever I imported plants from. =)


Sarracenia x 'Red Sumatra' - the waiting list for this one is just starting to pile up like mad.


Backlit photo of Sarracenia x mitchelliana.


OOOOH. The Holy Grail of Sarracenia! Sarracenia x moorei 'Adrian Slack'. There's a 50-person waiting list for this plant, and Mike only produces 2-3 extras a year. Crap.


Field of Sarracenia rubra flowers. OOOOOOH!


Yep. Had a really memorable time in Telford over the weekend, and it's definitely the highlight of my trip so far. Yeah, really nerdy,I know. Poring through 4500 different forms of Sarracenia (most of which look exactly the same, as yx will most definitely complain), stalking around the greenhouses to find root-boring caterpillars and Botrytis fungus, talking about plant genetics and debating on the perfect peat:sand:perlite ratio to use. And of course, the man swears by Osmocote while I insist on using 40:10:10 foliar feed. Admittedly, his method works better if you have that many plants to fertilise, but I love tinkling about in the garden - this just gives me an excuse to do that. ;) It's all very satisfying in the end, and I'm finally all the wiser about what works and what doesn't, and good plant husbandry. All of a sudden, I miss my plants too.