Variegated

[spiffyzha]

I seem to have gotten myself a surprise variegated sarracenia! I think. So far I only notice the variegation on one of its two flowers, and all its pitchers appear non-variegated. Obviously I'll keep a closer eye on it now though.

I should've taken a picture while this thing still had its petals; I guess it just didn't immediately occur to me that it was interesting, heh. The variegation was always there, but it definitely has gotten more visible as the flower-area has aged.


A pitcher, for reference.

I picked this guy up cheap last season from some dude who had a ton of sarrs growing on his rooftop. It's likely seedgrown, and has unknown breeding, but I guess it's probably some sort of flava or oreophila hybrid.

My theory is that if this plant is some sort of chimera expressing two distinct genomes, they may both produce pitchers with a similar appearance, but different colored flower-areas. But I'm really just guessing here.

 

[spiffyzha]

A tangentially related question for anyone who knows things:

Is variegation a potentially heritable trait? Based on my cartoon-level understandings of (a) chimerism and (b) sexual reproduction, it seems to me like it should not be possible to directly pass on a parent plant's variegation to its sexually produced offspring. Yet, I frequently see people trying to breed variegated parent plants in hope of getting variegated offspring. Does this ever work? Like ..... ever?

If variegation is heritable, then my mental picture of How Things Work is clearly very wrong, and ideally someone could ELI5 reality to me.

 

[Lloyd Gordon]

Genetic, transposons, chimeras, mosaic viruses, mineral deficiency.

 

[spiffyzha]

Genetic, transposons, chimeras, mosaic viruses, mineral deficiency.

I .... am extremely familiar with many of the individual letters you've used.

Nah, but really, this gives me at least a google starting point.

 

[barvinok]

You can ask Terry MacIntosh about this plant. He will have another sale in July

 

[Raymond]

Back when I had sarracenia I had 4 seedling show variegation which I suspected was viral. They all came from the same seed set and the soil has been repotted a few times. Only 2 kept the colour. Side shoots didn't show variations.This plant made weird leaves almost on every pitcher.