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| Sarracenia leucophylla blooming in the Conservation Gardens at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. |
Sometimes as a volunteer at the Atlanta Botanical Garden,
you’re given jobs to more or less get you out of the way. I don’t begrudge this, especially on
such a beautiful morning. The
potting benches inside were full, so my sister volunteers and I were assigned
to work on the Sarracenia growing
behind the greenhouses. They had
accumulated more than their portion of weeds and spent growth. Johnette, Jo
Ann and I were on the job! David
Ruland also instructed us to be especially pitiless with pitcherplants showing
signs of Exyra moth infestation.
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| Jo Ann Bertrand and Johnette Brosewood at work behind the main greenhouses at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. |
Pitcherplant Moths
Pitcherplant moths can do
what no other insect can: Walk
both down and up the slippery walls
inside the pitchers.[i] Young moth caterpillars feed around the
pitcher, girdling it so that it topples over. Older Exyra caterpillars weave a silk roof at the mouth of the pitcher. Almost all the plants we worked on were
white-top pitcherplants (Sarracenia
leucophylla), so I believe we were encountering the effects of Exyra semicrocea. We saw doubled-over
pitchers and also the drainage holes that the more mature caterpillars make to
prevent flooding while they pupate.
Exyra ridingsii are only found in the yellow pitcherplant (Sarracenia flava), and Exyra fax colonizes just purple
pitcherplants (Sarracenia purpurea).[ii]
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| Drainage hole likely made by Exyra catepillar. |
Order from Chaos
There is something so
satisfying about taking a pot that is full of weeds and spent growth and cleaning
in up so that it contains only the desired plant species looking its best. Here are some of the botanical
makeovers we performed.
 |
| Before |
 |
| After |
[If I could figure out how to put these before/after pics side-by-side I would.]
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| Before |
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| After |
Johnette Brosewood is the
most experienced volunteer when it comes to working with pitcherplants. She shepherds them through every stage
of life, and I am learning how to care for pitcherplants by working alongside
Johnette and Jo Ann. And we have our work cut out for us with a greenhouse full
of Sarracenia. Sometimes I feel
like a member of the paint crew on the Golden Gate Bridge: Once we’ve dragged our brushes over the
entire bridge, we cross and start all over again, only in our cases, repotting,
weeding, top-dressing and pruning.
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| Conservation Greenhouse |
Why does ABG have so many
Sarracenia?
Pitcherplant habitat is some
of the most endangered habit in Georgia (and elsewhere). Pitcherplants grew throughout the
Southeast, but land conversion into agricultural fields and residential and
commercial developments, fire suppression, and invasive species have
drastically cut their numbers. In
fact, in Georgia, pitcherplant bogs have been eradicated from the Piedmont and
nearly eradicated from the Blue Ridge Mountains.[iii] The Sarracenia in the
Conservation Greenhouse are a living gene bank of plants grown from seed
collected from pitcherplants in all the remaining mountain bogs. Should something happen to the plants
in the wild we have back up plants.
Meanwhile, ABG and its conservation partners (government agencies,
academic and botanical institutions, and landowners) work to restore and
maintain their natural habitat.
The Death of Big Gulp
One of the white-top
pitcherplants stood out among the rest.
It was considerably larger and whiter than its peers, and the mouth of
its pitcher formed a yawning maw.
Many of us had stepped out behind the greenhouse just to marvel at this
specimen. I named it Big
Gulp. At a certain point in our
labors I looked for Big Gulp and didn’t see him (if I can give it a name, I can
give it a gender).
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| Big gulp, before the tragic event. |
Alarmed, Johnette fished
through the bin where we tossed our cuttings and found the decapitated Big Gulp. She had seen the drainage hole and
simply snipped not realizing she had cut down our mascot. As a joke, I put a stick into the
bottom half of the cut pitcher so that we could stake Big Gulp back on. And I teased Johnette, calling her
Black Thumbs. Big Gulp had his revenge
though. His oversized-gullet was
so full of decaying insect carcasses that once opened, he released a terrific
smell. And a mass of red-eyed flesh flies
descended on his remains.
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| A chagrined Johnette |
[iii] Chafin,
Linda G.
Field Guide to the Rare Plants
of Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. P. 444.
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