Nepenthes pervillei: 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'

'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'

This quote from Samuel Beckett has recently been popularized to the broad audience thanks to Swiss tennis player Stanislas Wawrinka (I'm a huge fan of tennis! ;) who has tattooed this line on his right flank to reflect his philosophy of the game: no matter how hard one tries and fails, it is important to improve and try again. Well I'm certainly no tennis player but when dealing with the cultivation of a few plants of the genus Nepenthes, there are certainly a handful of plants I can't grow at all. 

Noteworthy exemples for me are Nepenthes rajah, N. villosa, N. mira, N. northiana, N. madagascariensis or N. pervillei. The endemic Seychelles species might be my all time favourite species, still I never managed to keep it under my care more than one year. I think I have killed likely a dozen plants over the last ten years. Most of the time, plants declined quite fast, a few months after I received them. Check the tale of my past 'achievement' here:

http://carnivorousockhom.blogspot.fr/2012/04/tantalizing-nepenthes-pervillei.html

Nepenthes pervillei or Anurosperma pervillei like botanist Hallier wanted to call it in a genus of its own (in 1921) acknowledging in that way its uniqueness when compared to the other species of the family, is a notoriously difficult species and growing it into maturity is a fairly rare and spectacular feat. I can hardly recall more than six growers who have managed to obtain true thriving plants in cultivation.

Among them is old fellow Jacques Besnard, a French Nepenthes enthusiast who has grown the species from seed to flower in the span of a few years. Hats off Jacques!

http://www.forumcarnivore.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=10353

Strangely, unlike Jacques, I have never embraced the idea to dedicate time and space exclusively for the little pervillei and I have been, I have to say, quite stubborn, trying to grow it among my other lowland Nepenthes or highland ones or intermediate ones, since it has been reported that it could be grown under various temperatures conditions.

I have changed my mind now. Incidently, I have some space available at the moment and I intend to try Nepenthes pervillei with a more efficient approach. I have been lucky to receive fresh seeds from two locations (The 'Trois Frères road' location and the 'Mount Copolia' one). Once seeds will have germinated, I will keep the plantlets in special areas and will give them special care, building in the process, when required, a terrarium that will only host Nepenthes pervillei plants.

But first things first. This is how the seeds look like. They lack the typical 'tails' on each side, a feature that is found in almost all the species of the genus. This is the second time I got my hands on these seeds. I remember how the first time I got my hands on them, I thought that there was a mistake and that they were some kind of weird sundew seeds! :)

I prepared yesterday a special mix based mostly on sand, fine gravel, akadama (a type of clay used by  Bonsai growers) and peat. This should dry quite quickly. I have lost most of my previous pervillei because of rot.

I received only a few seeds of the Trois Frères location but much more from Mount Copolia. I decided to split the seed portions and grow them in two different spots. The first one would be within my Petiolaris Drosera terrarium where humidity and temperature are high all year round. My main concern will be the excess of humidity (hence the special soil recipe).

Here is a closer look at one of the pots (on the left). I'm not sure that the plantlets from Mount Copolia will do well as Mt Copolia is a 900 metres high location (the resulting plants might eventually need cooler conditions) but I wanted to try this nonetheless since I had quite a lot of seeds from that place. The temperatures requirements of N. pervillei in the literature can be quite conflicting: success might actually depend on whether you have 'lowland' plants or more intermediate ones. In that terrarium, I also sew seeds of the Trois Frères location.

Since my conservatory is about to experience summer temperatures, I decided to sow the remaining seeds from Copolia in a propagator that I will place in a quite sunny spot of the conservatory alongside my specimens of N. vieillardii, N. bokorensis and my numerous Bromeliads. I will have to make sure that the propagator does not get overheated or I will loose everything; if the seed do germinate! If everything goes well, I plan to put the propagator in the house on next winter. Indeed, it will be too cold in the conservatory at that time of the year.

You can't see them but there are about 150 N. pervillei seeds in that layer of substrate below :)

Now, all I can do is wait. I will keep you updated on this new attempt at growing this so-called 'primitive' but fascinating species. Like Becket wrote (or Stanislas Wawrinka's tatoo reads):

'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'