BC - Northern Rockies - Fort Nelson

Eric

Carnivore
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Plants grown from seed. They are veined when growing in semi-shade and they get very red in full sun growing on peat.
Seed from this location was collected and circulated widely in the 90's. Unfortunately they did not germinate for me. The plants shown are from seed that I received (years later) from a grower in England who self-pollinated his plant. There is at least one nursery in BC that sells artificially propagated plants from this location. Another plant with the same location label made it into US collections on the West Coast. The latter is surprisingly a veinless plant. Veinless plants are very unusual and have not been reported from many places. They are found in good numbers only in a few bogs, mainly in Ontario (see Mazur(2005), CPN vol.34). It is not possible to rule out that some of the plants may have been unintentionally mislabeled.
So here are two links to see what their northern habitat (I think you can even see some pitchers and flower scapes peeking out of the sphagnum mat of this bog) and what the plants look like. The pitcher plant habitat near Ft.Nelson is one of the westernmost natural locations of S.purpurea. It is also one of the northernmost, however there are a few more locations farther North (up to circa 62°N) in the Northwest Territories.
 

H2O

Administrator
Staff member
This site fascinates me, although there is a possibility that some of the plants in circulation are still correct location data, I have serious doubts on much of what is being circulated.

One of the initial growers of this site has all of their purps mixed together and all are unlabeled and are IDed based on sight, not something I would trust over the course of a decade.

The veinless plant is also extremely questionable, like you have said every single account of veinless plants come from the east coast. The consistency of plants in from Central Ontario through Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC is very stable and having a single veinless plant show up from the most extreme west of the species limit is questionable. I could be totally wrong but these are my thoughts.

I'm planning a trip up there next fall to investigate what these plants look like and see if I'm wrong.
 

Carson Hardy

Carnivorous Plant Addict
I was fortunate to find one of the populations of purps near fort nelson last week. Every plant was veined, and quite dark. I took a bunch of photos, and will post many here.

I walked quite a ways to find these, and almost gave up... With only a few minutes left in my limited time, I found one, then another, then another, it was an amazing experience, and I hope to go back someday with a few days and a backpack worth of overnight gear. There are kilometres and kilometres of bog to explore up there.

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