Les Burdett's Sarracenia collection
Although my entire collection has been sold to Farmyard Nurseries I have decided to continue to display my website. If you are interested in any of the plants displayed you will need to contact Farmyard Nurseries to check whether they have plants available.
Having grown Sarracenia for a number of years I decided to try growing from seed and quickly found that plants grown from Sarracenia seed are very rewarding, more so than buying in plants and building a collection that is a clone of everyone else's.
It's quite exciting to go down to the greenhouse and spot a seedling turning into a special plant, watching it change day by day, week by week, year by year, you see the colours and shape
changing, developing, into a thing of beauty.
After a season or two, or five, you find that your Sarracenia seed grown plants have turned into a unique and beautiful collection to be proud of.
The menu on the left of the page gives access to pictures of some of my plants, click the thumbnails for the full picture.
Sarracenia seed - how to pollinate
Pollinating Sarracenia is a simple task that is performed when pollen has fallen from the Anthers onto the Style. I pick up the pollen from the Style with a cotton wool bud, then place it on to each of the Stigma of the 'mother to be' flower; remembering to label it with the names of mother and father. The Style is the bottom part of the flower that looks like an upturned umbrella, the Stigma is like a small hook and can be found just below the tip of each point of the Style. The seeds will be ready around October, I usually wait until the seed pod starts to crack, then cut it off and take indoors for 24 hours before opening the pod and removing the seeds. The Sarracenia seeds are put into labelled glassine envelopes in the refrigerator until sowing in December - February.
I have on occasion sown directly from the pod at harvest, as happens in nature, this works fine and germination is quite quick, but an early cold snap might kill a few tender seedlings off.
Each crossing will produce plants that have different qualities, very different looking plants will often result from a simple crossing and you will need to grow these on and pot up several times before deciding which to keep and which to throw out. I sow into 7k pots, 15 to 20 seeds per pot and in March/April of next year they will be large enough to pot up into individual 7k pots, if you don't have a lot of space you can get away with 9 seedlings into a 9k pot, they can then stay in those pots until they need more room.
It is possible to speed up growth by using fertilizers, such as Osmocote, and by using artificial light and heat over winter. Personally I'm in no rush, the pleasure I get from seeing them grow makes the wait worthwhile.
Farmyard Nurseries
Farmyard Nurseries stock a wide range of Sarracenia, including many plants originally from Adrian Slack's collection, visit www.farmyardnurseries.co.uk to add some of these great plants to your collection. They also have a great range of plants for your home and garden that are available by mail order or by visiting their beautiful nursery in Carmarthenshire.
If you like to read short funny stories then visit my book, all written by me, www.lesburdett.co.uk Les Burdett.
My greenhouses
The large greenhouse is 32'x 10' (9.75m x 3m), the small one 20'x 6' (6m x 1.8m), both are Elite High Eaves models which give that little extra hight for Sarracenia right up to the side glass. I certainly recommend growing in a greenhouse for the bright light that will develop full colour in the plants, as my photographs demonstrate.
More hybrids from Les Burdett
