Plant Profile: Pinguicula gigantea

This is part of a series of posts describing my experiences with different species, their culture requirements, and photos of their growth in my collection. The full series can be read here, or by species at the Series page

There's really no reason to not be growing Pinguicula gigantea. It's one of the easiest and most rewarding plants in my collection.

P. gigantea ready to bloom, 1-29-2015.

This was my first ping, and one of my first carnivorous plants. I bought it at the winter 2014 BACPS meeting. As I recall it was a Carnivore Culture acquisition. This post takes me back!

P. gigantea, 2-15-2014.

P. gigantea is a Mexican butterwort, but it's unique in several ways. It lacks a non-carnivorous succulent winter dormancy, and produces mucilage on the bottom of the leaves, unique among Mexican pings. It also gets really big, and has cute purple flowers.

P. gigantea bloom, 4-29-2014.

This plant gets identical conditions to my easy sundews – Drosera capensis etc. – and loves it. It first flowered for me in late April, after it had been in my collection for around 3 months. The flowers hang around for more than a week, which makes them a really wonderful addition to any collection. They also appear to encourage the plant to divide, which is great!

P. gigantea division forming, 5-23-2014.

I've never given this plant a dry period, and it gets very bright under my lights, and that has seemed to work very well. It blooms every other months or so, and after a few rounds of blooms it had developed 4 crowns.

P. gigantea offset, 11-21-2014.

Now, I haven't tried leaf pullings with this plant yet, but fortunately it propagates itself pretty easily. I basically ignored it and it quadrupled itself. Also, dividing pings is uh, not very difficult.

That's my father adding some appreciative grunts to the process. 

I may try some leaf pullings from this plant, and if I do I'll definitely post it on the blog. For this division (which I used in a trade), I just rinsed the moss and media out of the roots. Ping roots just mainly keep the plant anchored in the soil.

P. gigantea offset with roots, 1-29-2015.

This is a wonderful plant. If you're interested, Matt usually has it in stock. I've never ordered from Carnivore Culture online, but I've heard that the plants arrive in very good shape after shipping. Give it a shot!

The Breakdown

• media: Peat, sand, and perlite. People use all sorts of media for Mexican pings, and I don't pretend to be an expert. I tend to use more aggregate for my ping soil (extra perlite or pumice mostly).
• light: As much light as possible is good. Brighter light really improves the carnivorousness of the leaves.
• water: I keep it in the tray wet all year. This species doesn't have a non-carnivorous dry dormancy.
• temperature: My tray ranges in temperature from the low 50s to the mid 90s. Never had a temperature problem.
• feeding: I sprinkle ground up fish food on the leaves periodically. It definitely gets digested, and I think the plant benefits.
• propagation: P. gigantea divides fairly regularly. I believe leaf pullings work, but I don't have any experience.

Carnivorous Corner

I just made a fun discovery. There's a YouTube channel called Carnivorous Corner that is nothing but high-quality, short videos of carnivorous plants, especially videos of plants eating things. It's great, there are videos of pitcher plants, sundews, VFTs, and more.

I went ahead and subscribed, because the plants are attractive and well-shot, and it's exciting to see the bugs get got. The one I'm going to embed is sort of crazy. It's a 1-hour time lapse of some Sarracenia just chowing down on flies. It's amazing how many flies take the plunge in one hour.

I can't wait to see more videos.

Amazing video of Drosera glanduligera snap tentacles

Drosera glanduligera is often considered to be one of the more remarkable sundew species, since it demonstrates rapid plant movement on par with Dionaea (Venus fly-traps) and Aldrovanda (the waterwheel plant), making it one of the fastest-moving plants in the world.

Unfortunately, D. glanduligera is also pretty finicky to grow, requiring fairly specific temperature control and regimented feeding, so I'm unlikely to add it to my collection soon. However, on the ICPS page about the species I found an excellent video that includes some awesome real time and also 5x speed footage of the plant feasting on wingless fruit flies. It's in German with English subtitles.

I know a 23 minute video seems daunting, but it's pretty neat. For the impatient, the action starts around 5:08.

They've got a whole channel of carnivorous plant videos (and a pretty adorable intro video too). Not every video on the channel is translated, but there's a lot of cool footage, and the ones with translations are great. Guess I've found a new YouTube subscription!