itty bitty orchids?

April 23, 2008 11:14 PM

What is this tiny flower?

I've had these sundew since December. Recently, when I finally got them healthy, these tiny buds popped up.
There's six stems, two of them have a second bud about an inch above the first.
Only three have bloomed, and two fell off within a week.
They're not part of the sundew are they?

posted by gally99 to home & garden (8 comments total)

Maybe Anemone Nemorosa or wood anemones/windflowers. I was just on an island last weekend which was blanketed in the things, which I'd never seen before, and my SO told me that they only bloom at this time and die in a week (here they're called Buschwindröschen). We picked a little bouquet of them which thoroughly wilted before we even got it home.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemone_nemorosa

The West Coast variation:

http://www.calflora.org/cgi-bin/species_query.cgi?where-calrecnum=358
posted by Your Time Machine Sucks at 1:26 AM on April 24, 2008

They could well be part of the sundew. This Wikipedia picture looks similar.
posted by Solomon at 3:18 AM on April 24, 2008

Yeah, they could be new itty bitty sundews. A white or pink flower is usually part of the plant.
posted by iconomy at 6:56 AM on April 24, 2008

It is not part of the Sundew. Those are the flowers of a terrestrial Utricularia, commonly known as a Bladderwort. The photo is a little fuzzy but it looks like a Utricularia blanchetii. Like your sundew, it is also a carnivorous plant, however the trapping mechanism is underground, on the roots in the form of tiny little bladders which suck in prey such as nematodes.

Oh hey, you are local. You might want to join the Bay Area Carnivorous Plant Society. We meet once a quarter at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens. Membership is free, we are a friendly bunch, the meetings are always interesting (how to set up home-brew tissue culturing! Slideshows of carnivorous plants in Southeast Asia!), we have raffles and auctions and basically sit around and geek out about carnivorous plants. We also enjoy answering questions about CP (carnivorous plant) identification and care.

Incidentally, it's likely the reason your sundew suddenly got healthy this spring is because it was dormant for the winter :) Don't toss it out this fall when it suddenly 'dies' again.
posted by jamaro at 8:49 AM on April 24, 2008

Also, your sundew is forming a flower bract, that uber long stalk in the middle of the first photo. The stalk will develop a fern-like coil on the end of it, then flower buds will swell and burst in sequence on the end like this.
posted by jamaro at 8:57 AM on April 24, 2008

Thank you very much jamaro.
I saw pictures of bladderwort, but it seems like the flower is too small. What I read said bees were the common pollinators, and the flower seems too small for them. Also don't bladderworts live in water? The only water that's not soaked into dirt is in the dish under the sundew's pot.
And that bract is the second for this plant, it just showed up in the last couple weeks. There's another one that's about a foot long with 23 small pink/purple flowers on it.

Also thanks for the information on the thing at Cal. I'll definitely be checking that out.
posted by gally99 at 10:37 PM on April 24, 2008

There are two types of bladderworts: aquatic Utricularia which have no roots and live free floating in water and terrestrial Utricularia that have roots and live in moist soil. You have the later. I have several species of the terrestrial kind in just about every pot in my carnivorous plant collection, they can be somewhat invasive in a greenhouse and pop up in all sorts of random places. [here's some of mine growing among a profusion of sundews at the base of a S. flava. That pot started out as just the S. flava but now it's a jungle.] In my collection, they are frequently pollinated by hover flies, (which rarely land and get eaten when they do) but some species self-pollinate and all spread rapidly via stolons. The Utricularia genus is the largest one—a little over 200 species—and most globally wide-spread among carnivorous plants. Collectors value them for their orchid-like flowers (except for the aquatics, where the visible traps are the main attraction).

Your sundew (looks like a Cape Sundew, specifically a Drosera capensis "Typical") will send up those flower stalks all summer. You can pinch the stalks back if you want to increase the foilage growth as energy spent making flowers is taken away from making foilage. The plant is self-pollinating and if you shake the dried flower stalk over some moist soil, you'll soon have more baby sundews than you'll know what to do with.

I hope you can make it to one of BACPS's get-togethers: bring your plant, someone far more into Ultrics can tell you a lot more about it (I'm more into Nepenthes).
posted by jamaro at 9:14 AM on April 25, 2008

Awesome! Thanks again!
posted by gally99 at 10:38 AM on April 25, 2008