FlyTrapCare Forums

Has anyone ever seen this cross which Trev has posted photos of on his website? It looks stunning...

WOW! That is really gorgeous. It looks very similar to "Dracula" which is also one of Trev's creations.

Makes me want to move to Europe!

That's an amazing cultivar!! It must be hard to find. I love the orange/red colour in the traps.

That little plant of Trev's looks really great. It makes me feel good to see people growing their own unique Venus Flytraps from seed.

With so many of us doing that now, there are likely to be some very nice plants as a result. Some of the little seedlings I have right now look really interesting and it will be fun watching them grow to maturity during the next several years.

Steve_D wrote:It really makes me feel good to see people growing their own unique Venus Flytraps from seed.

Me too Steve! I hope that growers in the US can get up to speed with growers in the EU! They're really far ahead of us, but if we start propagating seedlings now, hopefully we can get some really unique VFTs!

It is a nice looking plant, like Matt said it looks a bit like Dracula. I think I need to contact Trev and get it added to my wishlist with him.

I have never tried to cross pollinate VFTs. I take it when it comes to growing VFTs from seeds it is a craps shoot on the traps the seedlings will take on? Also, is it correct that seeds from a 'Sawtooth'/'Red Piranha' will most likely not have the same traits as the parent plant? I have only propagated VFTs from leaf pullings and flower stalks.

Yes, in my experience no matter what they're parentage is, most seedlings' growth characteristics will fall within the wide range of what typical VFTs look like. However, you're more likely to get a special plant if you know that the parents have special genes to pass down.

jkochuni wrote:I have never tried to cross pollinate VFTs. I take it when it comes to growing VFTs from seeds it is a craps shoot on the traps the seedlings will take on? Also, is it correct that seeds from a 'Sawtooth'/'Red Piranha' will most likely not have the same traits as the parent plant? I have only propagated VFTs from leaf pullings and flower stalks.

Yes, with pollen and seeds, even if one pollinates the flowers of a plant with pollen from the same plant, the resulting seeds will produce a wide variety of offspring, so the resulting seedlings may not have the desired characteristics of the parents. Since I hand-pollinate all the flowers on my seed-producing plants I consciously try to make interesting cross-pollinations, but it's a pure gamble and a mystery what types of little plants will grow from all those mixtures of genetics.

With Venus Flytraps we're constrained to just a single species, Dionaea muscipula, unlike the vast genetic differences in inter-species breeding or even inter-generic breeding such as occurs with many orchids. Those can produce some really wild-looking offspring! But with Dionaea all we can do is to try to encourage and incorporate into breeding experiments the more interesting genetic results that occur. It's kind of fun though.

Steve

Anytime you cross polinate cultivars that are maintained by tissue culture the major of offspring are going to tend to be typicals in nature. If you keep doing it or do a lot of it you increase your odds of getting that rare cross with "all" of the recessive traits, or the recessives that you are looking for. Then you're back to tissue culturing that plant to maintian the looks you've got. Further polinating of any type while push you back into the typicals range usually. These plants want to maintain that large genetic diversity that typicals have. It's a suvival trait that is built in and tough to over come.

Also, I love this plant!!! Nice job.

Thanks for the great info!

Really beautiful plant.

After our VFTs from The Flytrap Ranch arrived my son (Andrew) decided that he really likes 'Red Piranha'. We already have some of these but none of them are as large yet as what we got from Steve. What Andrew likes the most is the sawtooth form of the plant.

He now wants to get some Sawtooth VFTs & cross pollinate with some of our red varities. He so needs to learn tissue culture.

Mary

Trev is one very clever man - his Dionaea always look stunning, I recently had a chat with him and found out that he's been breeding Dionaea since 2005, and the majority of seedlings turn out to be typical Dionaea. Also most of the interesting characteristics are recessive, so getting seedlings with combinations of these recessive traits are about 1 in a 1000.