Elusive white borage

Back in 2016 or 2017 I got some borage (Borago officinalis) seeds and grew out some borage plants.  I allowed my plants to self seed and it popped up in a lot of places around the garden.  I like the blue flowers, so never thought to get a white flowered variety.

Borage is an annual or biennial herb that has a lot of used in the permaculture garden.  It it is a  medicinal plant with edible leaves and edible flowers.  Borage is adored by honey bees and other pollinator insects, and its leaves are great in the compost.  Borage leaves smell and taste a little like cucumber, which is fun.  Poultry and livestock gladly eat borage leaves.

Each year my borage flowers profusely with lovely blue flowers.  As the flowers age they sometimes turn pink, this is an environmental thing.  After flowering they self seed, and when the time is ready it grows wherever the seeds happened to land.  I don't water it or weed it, sometimes I mow it if it is in the wrong place.  Other than that borage just does its thing with no work from me.  My honeybees like the flowers, and my chickens like to eat the leaves.  Borage is meant to be good at smothering weeds, and it is excellent in the compost.

I was selecting for larger plants, but gave up on that after a while because it isn't needed.  Some borage plants grow massive, others remain tiny.  With my narrow gene pool, growing conditions and environment appear to play a larger role in determining the size of the plants than genetics.

This year one of the self seeded plants has white flowers! 

White Flowered Borage

I've never grown white borage before

I have never seen a white flowered borage in this population before.  One of three things has happened here:

1. Perhaps this has arisen from a mutation that occurred spontaneously in my population.  
2. Maybe blue is dominant, and my population has always had hidden recessive genes for white that have never been displayed before this.  This seems unlikely (but not impossible) given the number of generations this population has grown here with no whites.
3. Maybe someone nearby has white borage and insects brought the pollen in last season (or a few seasons ago).  

I will never know for sure, but like to think that this may be a spontaneous mutation.  It isn't uncommon for one gene to get broken and produce something novel like this.

I have never grown white borage before, and have not been able to find out if blue or white is dominant.  I hope to save some seed from my open pollinated white borage and see what its progeny do.  Update: it appears that blue borage flowers is dominant and white is recessive.

Regardless of the outcome, I think having one white flowered plant appear like this is kind of fun.

Regular blue borage flowers taste like cucumber

Blue borage flowers fade to pink

Even on cold days there are often bees on borage flowers

Bees and other pollinators love borage

Blue borage growing among the lawn weeds

I hope to be able to save some seed of the white borage to see what colour flowers their progeny has.  I dare say it will drop some seed as well as me collecting some seed, and this will become part of the borage gene bank in my yard.  

Growing pygmy sundews from gemmae

Last year I got some pygmy sundew gemmae.  Gemmae is sort of like a cutting that the plants made themselves.  I find it fascinating that a flowering plant can make gemmae like this.

I got a mix of two species, they look very different so I could tell them apart pretty easily as soon as they grew large enough.  

Gemmae tend to grow much like seed, but a lot faster.  Unlike seed grown plants, all gemmae are genetically identical to the parent plant.  

In a few months the gemmae went from tiny green dots to mature, flowering pygmy sundews.

Drosera pulchella

Sadly when the gemmae were available I did not have any spare pots, and had issues buying peat moss.  I grew them in plastic cups with holes punched in the base, and the peat moss had been sitting out in the open for some time.  For this reason there was a lot of moss and things growing around my pygmy sundews.

Drosera pulchella and Drosera pygmaea

Pygmy sundews

These flowers should produce very tiny seed.  Seed grown plants should have a little genetic diversity.  D pulchella and D pygmaea do not hybridise, so I can grow them next to each other and not worry about hybrid seed.  

Some species of pygmy sundews can hybridise, and several of the hybrids are sterile.  Gemmae are always exact replicas of the parent.  Which means that hybrids or even sterile hybrids can be easily propagated using gemmae.

Pygmy sundews produce from 1 to several hundred gemmae per plant.  This means in the wild they can colonise areas of soil quite effectively.  It also means that in cultivation it does not take too long to be able to grow a nice pot filled with these tiny carnivorous plants.

The weather is turning, so I hope some of my plants produce some gemmae.  If they do I should be able to grow a few more of them and hopefully will be able to have a few extras to trade at some stage.  If I ever do have extra of these they will be listed through my for sale page.

Vft Schuppensteil - Upright Red Traps

I got some unnamed Venus flytraps a year or two ago.  These were cheap as it was a mix of varieties and the names had been lost.  There was a lot of genetic diversity among them.  Most of them I sold to make a little pocket money to spend on more plants.

One of them impressed me, so I kept it and called it 'upright red traps'.  This plant grew tall upright leaves over summer, and the trap interior got very red in strong light.  Over winter they die back to almost nothing.  This isn't a bad thing in itself. 

I took some cuttings, and divided the mature plant, and was pretty happy with this plant.  

More mature plants started to develop leaf scaling and I think it may be Schuppensteil, but I am not certain.  Below are some photos of the scaling that started to develop on plants that were coming out of dormancy.  They got a lot more red inside the traps as the season progressed.

Much like the descriptions I have read of Schuppensteil, the scaling on the petioles is a trait that is acquired with maturity and only in summer; younger plants and plants early in the grow season will often not express this until later.  That sounds a lot like what my plants did.

The scaling got a lot more prominent than can be seen in these photos, but I don't have any pictures of that because the plants were damaged in a storm and reverted to smooth petioles for the rest of the season.  

The traps on this variety got rather large and the trap interiors becomes very dark red in strong sunlight.  The traps were certainly nowhere near as large as 'Big Vigorous' or 'DCXL', but they were still impressive.

Upright Red Traps is a vigorous grower for me.  It produces tall growth and intense red colour inside the traps.  It seems to grow pretty easily from leaf pullings and flower stalk cuttings.  

Over winter, while dormant, the thing basically disappears.  That is nothing to be afraid of, it just means that if there is hail or something the plant will not sustain any damage.  

For me they seem to produce a few natural divisions per year, which means I can increase their numbers with no real extra effort on my behalf. 

As I am not certain of the variety I will continue to call these 'Upright Red Traps'.  I will sell/swap some in the warmer months along with other carnivorous plants and perennial vegetables I have for sale.  If you are interested they will be listed on my for sale page.