I raised a number of Cyp acaule seedlings from seed and distributed this year. Everyone put them into pots with pine duff or into the ground under White pine (I did a few of each). Amazingly, nearly all are doing well. Here is one that is under a White pine in CT. Its new owner notes that he has done very little with it this year other than water a couple of times. It has grown markedly.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y100/fundulopanchax/Cypacauleseedlingpine.jpg

It will be interesting to see how these fare over time.

Ron

Neato! I'd say at this rate that little fellow will be blooming in a few years. It will be very interesting to see how they grow, and if they can successfully reproduce in these new areas.

I'm all for back to nature and giving something back to Mother Nature. Good job and thank you for sharing it with us!

Beautiful job!! I love to see plants going back into the wild, which is how it should be!! :thumbsup:

Nice job Ron,

I'm back on line now and have also caught up with some other projects, one of which was to collect 2 maturing acaule seed pods from where i found plentiful plants. As they dry the seed will be mixed with some coarse all purpose sand, enough for a belt pouch so I can scoot some around when I hike through some favored local woods that "look" like they should have acaule but don't.

Bonaventure Magrys

Super cool...:cool:

Now thats really cool!

Is that mine? It looks familiar!

Hi, Ladyslipper Grower - that one is yours! One of our other members have one in a pot - and it also grew very large (4 cm leaves) if he chooses to post it. He describes the growing medium as "pine mud."

In measuring these seedlings, they grew this year to the same size as first year seedlings - ie the first year they show up - in the population that I follow close by here (several thousand individuals, I mapped three easily-defined groups within it of nearly 400 specimens and have followed them since 2001 for increase/decrease in number, flowering percentage, pod percentage, and percentage of pods that survive to release seed). The wild first year seedlings have almost always bloomed the third year following. These seedlings were derived from seed collected at that population so it will be interesting to see how our artificially propagated ones compare. These should be considered relevant genetically since we live only a few miles from the natural source.

Now that I live up here and have tramped around in the woods, I have found some adults in my woods and in the woods directly across the river so I will make sure to pollenate and spread some really local - within 100s of feet of my beds - genes!

The other thing I did this fall, which is similar to Bonaventure's plan, above, is to take a couple of pods and distribute the seed into my woods in specific areas under pine and hemlock so I can track germination. There has been a nice study of this in the West using Cyp montanum seed, sponsored by the US Nat Forest Service and this practice dramatically increased the number of seedlings and eventually flowering plants at those sites.

Glad you are back up Bonaventure - your pkg arrived yesterday.

Ron