Albert's Greenhouse

At some point, it becomes clear that one has too many plants and not enough time. Or at least it should become clear.

For instance, ever since I was a child, I have absolutely loved the drosera, or sundews. The idea of a plant that creates its own sticky flytrap, and the wraps its deadly leaves around whatever it captures, has fascinated me to no end ever since seeing it in glorious time-lapse action in an old 8mm educational film in junior high school.

So I grow a lot of droseras. There are cool miniatures from Australia, beautiful rosettes from South America, and even species native to the west coast of the United States not a hundred miles from where I live.

But there are tradeoffs here. You can spend your entire life exhaustively researching a few plants and know everything about them. Or you can collect hundreds and hundreds of different plants with different requirements and then have neither the time nor the energy to actually look up whether they are supposed to go dormant in the winter.

I still have no idea whether this drosera was supposed to go dormant this fall, but I am certainly glad to see it sprouting a few new leaves now that spring is just around the corner.