Preserving the Pitcher Plant

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by Cate House

ardner and Mellichamp fertilize the plants by taking pollen from the chosen males and placing some on each female daily for four to five days. This is to ensure that they're fertilizing the females at the most receptive point. If the male plants bloom (produce pollen) before the female plants are receptive, the pollen can be stored in a refrigerator until the females are ready. To keep promiscuous bees from further pollinating the plants, they cover each plant with cheese cloth or nylon stockings. "You want to make sure that the only pollen going onto the plant is the pollen you put on it," Gardner says.

When the seeds mature in the fall, Gardner and Mellichamp plant them and then wait. "It takes twelve to eighteen months before you can even begin to get an idea of what those seedlings will look like," Gardner says. Out of thousands of seeds, they may pick only the three to five best seedlings and continue to grow and evaluate them.

Over the years, Gardner and Mellichamp have crossed dozens of different varieties. Sometimes they're surprised; sometimes they're disappointed. "We've learned a lot," Gardner says. "And we've come up with some fun and beautiful hybrids."

Gardner says many people shy away from pitcher plants because of their specialized growing conditions. "But we're hoping to change that," he says. By breeding pitcher plants that can grow in pots, Gardner and Mellichamp will be able to market them on a much bigger scale, even internationally.

Since pitcher plants take a long time to grow from seedlings, mass marketing requires more than just selecting a hybrid and letting nature takes its course. The solution is tissue-culture technology. Working with Carolina's Office of Technology Development, Gardner and Mellichamp will patent and mass produce several of their hybrid varieties.

hey've contracted several tissue culture labs to help them produce tens of thousands of each hybrid by taking cell tissue from the hybrids and placing it in tissue-cell cultures. First, technicians dissect the plant to get the tissue, known as meristematic tissue, then they put the tissue through a sterilization process (they rinse it with solutions of bleach) to get rid of any bacteria. Some plants can be reproduced using seeds, or even a piece of plant. But with these hybrids, the technicians can't use seeds because they need to know what the resulting plant will look like. Also, it's better to use tissue rather than a piece of leaf since pitcher plants tend to have a lot of bacteria and fungus growing on their leaves. After sterilizing the tissue, the staff place it in tubes on a rotating table. Keeping the tissue in motion "confuses" it, so it doesn't know which end is up. Instead of growing roots and leaves, it makes lumps of undifferentiated tissue, all with the same genetic information. Next, workers cut the tissue into smaller pieces and place it in nutrient-rich test tubes under fluorescent lights, where it begins to develop leaves and roots. Finally, these "test tube babies" grow into small, genetically identical plants which can be sold to nurseries and other venders, allowing customers to buy horticulturally superior pitcher plants from a variety of reliable sources, as opposed to supporting the practice of collecting them from the wild.

"One day soon," Gardner says, "we're hoping our hybrids will be widely available, so that people will be able to pick one up off a store shelf."

 

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