FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hey guys so I've just been noticing some extremely strange behavior these last few months coming from my Sarracenia purpurea ssp. venosa.
It's a seed-grown, mature, flowering-sized plant that has flowered for me twice in the last two growing seasons, but last season, it had an absolutely bizarre growth pattern:

It flowered in the spring and the flower was pretty misshapen. It had two sepals, and three petals, with one of the petals being grossly deformed and the flower was sterile (lacked stamen I believe). Then, it vigorously grew, clumping, filling and splitting its little 7in pot. Sometime around mid-August, it flowered... again. This time, it produced a perfect flower and began making seeds. I probably should have cut the seedpod off immediately, because a few weeks later, the plant began to die back for dormancy.

Now fast forward, and it's coming out of dormancy. Except it has been extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY slow getting going. It has only put out two leaves thus far (in about a month of growth) and there is no flower in sight. I know the plant is alive and well because the rhizome is starting to force itself out of the dirt and the roots poking out of the bottom of the pot are still nice and white and very much alive. I couldn't find anything on the internet that matched the crazy behavior of my plant so I wanted to see if anyone could offer their two cents. I don't really know what to think of this. Most of my plants are Nepenthes, and those don't have dormancy cycles, so I'm not sure what to expect, or to look for in terms of red flags. What the heck is going on? Photos attached is of it going into dormancy around mid-November after a trim (second photo), and then of it about a week ago. The flower pod in the second photo was a lot fresher than it looked; it was still moist and had a lot of purple pigment. The two new leaves from this spring are just barely visible. I trimmed it to the ground and I could not see any new signs of growth/new pitchers, although it had multiple green/red 'points' on the rhizome, which I assume are future growing points.

I would guess that the main growth point died over winter. I had a venosa do the same thing last year.

Nevermind, main growth point and like 4 additional growth points just put out new leaves and a flower bud, all is good.