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Light and Color

Joseph Clemens

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<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>With enough good strong light and the proper balance of other environmental factors, even Drosera adelae can get quite colorful.

The secret is not to let the light make the leaves too warm (hot). This is a juggling technique, juggling of humidity, soil moisture, air temperature, air movement, etcetera. This can work with many plants, CP as well as other house and garden plants too.</span>

d_adelae%20004_sml.jpg
 
Excellent photography, and amazing plant. Thanks for sharing!
 
Good light is essential for maintaining color and typical form in Drosera.  Growers should be aware if the plant is twice as far away from a light source, the amount of light reaching the plant is not halved, but is 4 times less.  A matter of inches is a great deal, and the closer you can place your plants to the tubes the better.  Use of even a thin film of plastic wrap, or a glass cover cuts the amount of light reaching the plants by a great amount, which is why non-terarium culture of the plants is always preferable to growing them under glass.  Most species will do fine in lower humidity, but will not thrive in lower light.  Use of a room humidifier allows for this in many instances.

Drosera_villosa_var_ascendens_102103_1r.jpg
 
My D. adelae here at work is the same color as Joseph's..a beautiful bronzy red. It is being grown very simply in a 10-gallon tank sitting in a west-facing window...a very simple no-fuss set-up which so far has worked pretty well. I can't post a pic since I'm here at work with no access to my server.
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Both of those are spectacularly beautiful plants! *drool*!

I will always be in love with sundews...pictures like that make me weak in the knees... Is there something wrong with me?
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Yes, you have the disease: might have even caught it from me....no, wait, I remember you were already wide eyed and drooling when I first met you.
 
Wow, you all have very nice adelaes!  Tamlin, that rule for light intensity only applies for point sources of light (MH or HPS), not for linear sources like fluorescent bulbs (assuming the bulbs extend significantly to either side).  A linear source intensity falls off as the reciprocal, so twice as far is half the light.

But still... good rule of thumb.
 
Ahhh. Thanks for the correction DM....I never was much of a physicist! The plant in my photo is D. villosa var. ascendens which is one of the most deeply colored Drosera species that I grow.
 
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... and i never was much of a taxonomist. I didn't realize that wasn't D. adelae. Now that i look closer, it's obvious. It does look a lot like it in that photo - it's the fuzzy, fiddlehead new leaves.
 
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