Q: Drosophyllum: cultivation

• Mature plant
• Young plant
• Seedlings
• Germination!
• Seed

A: This is not an easy plant to grow. I think that overall success depends upon whether you are lucky enough to get seeds of a strain which grows well for you. I had seeds of a plant that grew fabulously in Arizona, but when I moved to California the plants performed poorly and died before flowering. Meanwhile, seeds from another source are growing marvelously in conditions that would have been toxic to the plants I grew in Arizona!

To germinate, Drosophyllum seed must be fresh. Various forms of pre-germination treatment involving giberellic acid, boiling water, fire, scarification, and stratification have been suggested and tried, but I have found that if the seed is less than a few months old it will germinate well without special treatments. If you have old seed, you can try the tricks I mentioned, but don't hold your breath.

• Ripening fruit
• Old inflorescence
• Sex bits
• Flower
• Flower bud

The soil medium should be a sandy peat mix; I like to include large aggregate materials like 1-cm chunks of pumice, perlite, or rocks in the soil too. The highly regarded carnivorous plant author Adrian Slack suggests slack-potting these plants, although of course he did not call it that!

I find that the plants grow well in a 50% humidity greenhouse without special treatment. If you live in a suitably warm climate such as the Mediterranean climate of my home in the central valley of northern California, you might have success growing them outside in full sun. Grow only a few plants in each pot for best results. Do not fertilize them. Do not transplant a specimen unless it is less than a few cm tall and you are practiced at the genus. Vegetative propagation is not successful, although some work has been done on growing the plant in vitro.

A perennial in the wild, Drosophyllum is difficult to maintain past two years in cultivation---it often lives just long enough to produce seed. Also, many commonly grown strains of this plant die rapidly if the temperatures ever exceed 41-43°C (105-110°F).

Page citations: D'Amato, P. 1998a; Gonçalves, S. & Romano, A. 2005; Rice, B. 2006a; Slack, A. 1979, 1986; personal observations.