Many nurseries all over the world, including popular names such as California Carnivores, Cantharifera, Black Jungle, Par-O-Bek Orchids and Dangerous Plants, work as distributors for Rob and Diana's plants. In this way, those rare species that once were sold by a few nurseries to a few hobbyists, are now becoming more available and less expensive, also the risk of becoming extinct in their natural habitat is reduced. And that's one of the main concepts of BE: Conservation. Lots of Nepenthes species are nowadays disappearing in the wild, mainly because of deforestation and to a lesser degree because of illegal poaching. BE carefully selects clones from tissue culture, keeping an archive of all the sites the parent plants are coming from. When and if some of these species will become extinct in the wild, they'll be reintroduced to their original site of origin. In the mean-time the availability of so many rare species at low prices will result in illegal poaching being rendered useless. That's a great way to thank these plants for all the happiness they gave to us CP lovers!
There's no need to say what a great experience was meeting Rob (I often used to hear his name when I was a CP kid, he started exporting Nepenthes thirty years ago and even helped Adrian Slack to complete his book's section dedicated to the tropical pitcher plants, as at that time not much was known about their cultivation!) and above all meeting his thousands of plants and being able to look after them. Anyone who grows Nepenthes knows how every single specimen is different from another and how useful it can be to grow so many different plants in so many different conditions with the opportunity of having long experienced people to tell you how they have been grown in the last decade. So imagine the advantages that you can get having not one N. rajah, but 3,000 to work with. Unfortunately before enjoying the advantages I enjoyed a headache due to the overload. In fact, if usually I loose my sleep thinking about the new leaf of some plant I have that is growing smaller than the previous one and I need to understand why, here it took me one week just to have a fair idea of which plants were growing in the nurseries and how they were being grown. And still after three months I was trying to find the best way to improve the growth rate and quality of some of the about 80 species they have in the collection. But let's start from the beginning…
Once I arrived in Colombo I was driven to Thalawathugoda. Here BE has its lab and lowland nursery, where the lowland species are growing in "heavy" lowland conditions, about 37 �C and 70 % humidity. Here I had a quick shower and straightaway I asked to see the plants. There are 4 greenhouses, taking a total area of about 1,050 square meters. I noticed how lots of benches are covered with different varieties of N. rafflesiana and N. ampullaria. But then of course also plenty of all the other lowland species that I can't list here, but hopefully the pictures will be enough explicative. What most impressed me was a N. bicalcarata about three meters high, with one meter long leaves and a 3 cm thick stem (think about it if you grow this plant and don't have a lot of room!), big, red N. ampullaria with lovely basal rosettes, the infinite N. rafflesiana variations and all the plants grown outdoor, in plain clay, often in full sun (N. khasiana, mirabilis, ampullaria, rafflesiana e gracilis, all of them from two to four meters).
Even if all the plants here are adult and at least 10-15 cm in diameter, not all of them are extra large, so unfortunately I couldn't see enormous N. northiana or merriliana, that are in great demand and that I particularly like. In fact, as was often told, as soon as many of the plants reach a salable quality and size, they're sold. So in some way all that is left in the nursery is what wasn't good enough to be selected and shipped to the customer. There are some exceptions, as among the sale quality plants of each clone of each species, the best specimen is selected to become part of the stock collection. Here all the plants are grown until they flower, produce seeds and give another range of variable, high quality clones. And they also supply the best material for TC propagation.
About 15 people are working in the lowland nursery, all coming from a nearby village. Here in Sri Lanka it's still possible to breathe the old colonial atmosphere and as far as I'm concerned that was very pleasant. I refrain from giving any moral opinion, but it's quite easy to get used to being called "sir" by everybody, to be served for everything you need, from dish-washing to tea-making, from clothes-washing to car-driving.
I think that's not only due to the low price you have to pay for this quality of life, but also to the fact that so poor is the world around you and so easy it is to make it a bit less poor by helping with your money and at the same time to live far from that poverty, that it's hard to renounce to the possibility to feel richer, here where it's so easy.
Going back to the plants, I still had to see the most impressive ones, those highland species that are amazing to see as much as slow and hard to grow. After having spent a couple of days in Thalawathugoda, repotting and hanging N. ampullaria, I went with Diana to Lindula, where the highland nursery is, 5 hours distant, up in the mountains. Here the weather is much more comfortable, 25 �C by day and 10�C by night. And finally I met Rob, my hero. We visited all the greenhouses that cover an area of about 1,140 square meters. Of course the most impressive one was the stock nursery, where again the best specimens are grown to full maturity to give the best reproduction material. Words are not enough to describe that scary N. truncata, that amazing N. burbidgeae, that aggressive N. hamata, that provocative N. spathulata, all those different N. veitchii, those N. sanguinea ranging from violet to deep red to orange, the barrel-like pitchers of N. sibuyanensis, the real N. petiolata, the impressing filaments under N. lowii's lid, and a bunch of very attractive plants, all similar, that I think belong to the ovata/diatas/carunculata/bongso/densiflora group. But probably the best thing is to show you the pictures, and that's after all the best and most expicative part of this article. Rob told me that he could spend the whole night in this nursery, just looking at the plants and drinking a few beers in good company. Don't tell me!
Then we went in the nursery where all the highland species are grown, from the TC to extra-large size. But after seeing the stock plants, these did not look so impressive. I could just see tens of thousands of small pots and labels with green spots inside. In the late afternoon my hosts showed me my new home and I was later invited for a BBQ at their place, it was a delightful evening.
After eating some well cooked lamb and helped by some white wine, as during our most typical Italian CP meetings, we all started feeling more comfortable and as it happens with all the CP lovers from any corner of the world, independently from their character, we started talking about Nepenthes in such an involving way that we couldn't even remember our own names if we were asked. Rob was talking about taxonomy, about the clones in cultivation, about artificial lighting, about Adrian Slack, about trips lasted for weeks in lost places looking for new species, while I was commenting and asking, asking and commenting and then talking about my CP experiences and how I thought we could improve some of the species they have. Apparently what they need here is another grower, someone who feels the plants, someone who can go beyond growth graphics and "smell" the problem, just looking at leaves and pitchers day after day, week after week. Oddly enough, Rob doesn't consider himself such a person, while he trusts Diana and, from now on, me as well, in this sense. You can imagine how proud I felt. Before the end of the evening he told me "we have all the plants you need, your ideas are as good as mine and there's no limit to improvement".
It's a shame that we only had another couple of dinners like that. Two days later in fact Rob and Diana went back to the lowlands and left me in good company with the staff, the plants and "funnywalk" Tarzan, the night-watcher. I already had a few things to do, including setting up my trials. And after looking at those thousands of plants, belonging to about 60 different species, just for a couple of days, it's quite hard to understand what's not working properly and set up the right experiment, believe me. I met Rob not many other times since then, I was always submerged in my job, often supervised by Diana, and he was nearly always in the lowlands, where BE has its main office. During the few days Rob and Diana spent in Lindula together, we used our free time relaxing and watching "Friends" or "Sex and the city" on DVD. The bad side of this area is in fact isolation. The TV usually doesn’t work because of the surrounding mountains, local people don't speak a good English, they live with their families, far away from the nursery. No shops, roads, night lighting, nothing. Just the mountain, the nursery, my place and Rob's place. Once every one or two weeks the car was available to go to the nearest town and do some shopping. Thank God I also had internet, apart from a short period when lightening struck and almost burned the motherboard.
So, life went on like this, working a lot, learning a lot, breathing good air, with some bore and full immersion in these plants. Yes, because while at the beginning of this experience I was afraid I could be overloaded with their presence around me and I could even come to hate them, eventually that didn't happen...on the contrary! My brain was able to sustain the load and use it and work on it, day and night, to understand more and more, and think about possible improvements and solutions. And, unbelievably, I was really missing MY own plants!
As a final "thank you", as if I needed any, I was given the best of all gifts. Free shopping! Not at the shopping center but...in the nurseries. I was allowed to go and choose whichever plant I wanted, and all of them will be sent to me for free by one of the European distributors, to avoid any customs problem. I don't think I'll ever have another chance like this, especially with the possibility to strain to spot the best specimens for three months.
Don't expect me to tell you any miraculous trick that at BE they use to have such big and healthy plants. On the contrary, conditions here can be quite harsh, especially in the dry season. They use coir (coconut fiber) as potting media, and Osmocote as fertilizer. But that's just because you can't find nor import peat or sphagnum in Sri Lanka and for sure you cannot feed thousands of plants with insects, pitcher by pitcher. If the fact that there's no special recipe to get the perfect plant disappoints you, there are a couple of reasons why you should be happy. First of all it means that you can have the same results of BE if where you live you have the right conditions that we all know and you start with good quality specimens. Then it also means that if at BE they had such a success in such unique growing conditions, you're more likely to grow the plants you buy from them even better than they do.
Finally, please don't think that I'm paid by this Company for all these nice words. I just think they love these plants (you should just see how maniacally careful they are when they select and pack plants for orders!!) and they work incredibly hard not only to spread them in cultivation all over the world, but also to be able one day to preserve them in their natural habitat. Diana in particular is in charge of supervising the job of about 30 people, including highland and lowland nursery, and luckily she has the right personality to do that, fast and furious, like the Company she's running! I'm proud to belong in some way to their team. And they deserve to grow as fast as they are already doing, keeping this dream alive in such a problematic Country like Sri Lanka, where the biggest problem is to find smart and hard working people to increase their staff. How can you help? Just buy and enjoy their great plants.
