A rare find: N. rajah nat. hybrid

[unclemasa]

A friend recently returned from a trip to Mt. Kinabalu and shared some pictures of his adventures with me. A skilled photographer he tooks some great in situ photographs of the local flora including some very nice shots of Nepenthes.

Among the Nepenthes he encountered was an unusual natural hybrid and I though I'd give our readers a chance to speculate about it's composition.


















photographs courtesy of Shawn in T-land

[bonsay]

just an extremely wild guess... rajah x lowii( or ephipiata ) or the other way round... greenish upper ??

[jimmy]

Bonsay, your extremely wild guess is right on the money - it was posted in the Pet Pitcher forum as N. lowii x rajah. Shawn also took some excellent pictures of N. villosa and other fantastic Nepenthes.

[nepenthesfreak]

I was going to say lowii x rajah or the reverse cross. Must be a pretty robust plant.

[Noa_F]

Wow, thats ridiculous. What an incredible find.

[rainforest]

Moove over Trusmadiensis, this one is way better!

Now how do we sign up to get one? Do we have to buy a thousand dollars worth of crap before we can own one of these?

Curious minds want to know!

M

[srduggins]

No, buy $1K of crap and you may get lucky enough to get one.

[shawnintland]

Nice approach to posting Sam! I like it. I really don't know if it's raja x lowii or the other way around. The site uphill was heavily populated with N. raja and I didn't see any lowii nearby. There were a few N. burbidgeae nearby as well.I'll post a few of the nearby raja's in another thread.

The plant seemed to be 'in transition'. If you look at the two 'leaf' photos you'll see that the first one shows an upper leaf (higher up on the plant) and the tendril is emerging right out of the end of the leaf. The next picture is a lower leaf. The only pitchers were lowers, but I'd love to check back on it in a few months and see if the 'upper leaves' start making upper pitchers.

[rainforest]

Would you guess that this plant is a recent offspring? I am always curious how old these wild plants are. Some people have guessed that they are hundreds of years old, while many say less. I imagine trunk size would be a good indication. From information we as growers know about these plants. They seem to grow a lot faster (when conditions are right) so a large plant may appear to be ancient, it might be just something like ten years old. Rajah is a slow grower, yet look at the strides we have made with this species in such a short time. Soon we will see more blooming captivity plants and eventually masses of seedling originals.

Meanwhile the hybrids we find of this species is always a joy to behold. I would say there will be a lot of rajah hybrids when they do come into bloom.

M

[shawnintland]

Hi Michael, I'm not sure on the age but I'd guess somewhere in the middle. I've tried to go through my other photos to see if I had a 'full frontal' shot of the plant but to no avail. The plant was tucked into some overhanging vegitation, the fog was rolling in and, as usual, I was the last one coming down the mountain so didn't hang out. We also came across some other interesting hybrids, among them; n.x Kinabaluensis (rajah x villosa) and N.x harryana (N. villosa x edwardsiana), N. lowii x hurelianna, and even spotted possibly the first reported naturally occurring N. vogelii x faizaliana.

Regarding the age question; I can perhaps find out more info from the Nat'l Park Service employee that I was introduced to. He might have an idea when he first saw it anyway. I was told that some of the rajah's we were seeing were in the neighborhood of 40 years and it was believable. I agree - can't wait to see flowering captive plants and their offspring! We were all wondering about an easy to care for, vigorous N. raja x ventrata cross (among many, many others!)!

[rainforest]

Very good!
I still have my eyes on a future N. rajah x sibuyanensis, since after seeing so many sibuyanensis hybrids showing great vigor and attain such large proportions. While N. rajah crossed with truncata, ventricosa, et al, I think after seeing what hybrids are around with sibuyanensis, my bet would be a cross with sib to get size plus vigor!

Thanks for an excellent report!

M