Nepenthes flowers:
Nepenthes flowers normally have no petals, just four sepals. When my
N. x dyeriana was flowering a few months ago, a male plant by the way -
Nepenthes are dioecious (flowers of different sexes on different plants),
several anomalous flowers had 1 to four petals. These petals look nearly
identical to the sepals. As they were in a whorl between the base of the
fused stamens and the whorl of sepals, I assume they were actually petals
and not just a superfluous number of sepals.
Did you know:
This info is from my dictionary of botanical terms ... for some reason,
many botanists use the term "glabrous" to mean "smooth" when describing plant
material. But, the term "smooth" IS a valid botanical term. The term
"glabrous" should be reserved to only mean "not hairy" which is not
necessarily the same as "smooth".
I got e-mail from Gordon Snelling yesterday. He's trying to find an alternate
way to access e-mail.