CP Slide Shows and tutorials

This portion of the CP database is for tutorial and educational slide shows. Expect lots of changes here as more material is added.

• "Pings: a guided tour of care and cultivation". This is an introduction to the genus Pinguicula, which are commonly known as "butterworts". The flowers of these plants have been compared in beauty to the orchids. They are easy to grow when you know their specific cultural needs, and are very efficient carnivores, trapping small gnats with their sticky leaves.
• "Tissue Culturing CP in the Home Kitchen: a tutorial". Tissue culturing is a method of growing plants in sterilized flasks of nutrients and agar-gel. This technique can rapidly multiply rare and endangered plants for distribution to botanists and hobbiests. Although traditionally thought of as "high-tech" bioscience, basic tissue culturing is easily done at home with simple equipment.
• "Striking Nepenthes cuttings", by Trevor Hannam. A hydroponic, tissue culture inspired technique for rooting Nepenthes cuttings with high reliability. Try it out!

Historical Documents

• Plant Traps and Decoys by F. Martin Duncan & L. T. Duncan, Reprinted 1930 in Great Britain by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh. This old text is out-of-date and contains erroneous information, but is very campy and fun to read. (converted to HTML by Kevin Snively).
• Stories of the Universe Another old account of carnivorous plants by Grant Allen, 1895. Full of errors, but fun to read. (again scanned by Kevin Snively).

Teaching Suggestions

• "Swelling the Brains of Children", by Peter D'Amato. This article was published in the March 1996 Carnivorous Plant Newsletter. It gives several eye-opening suggestions for using CP as a teaching tool. Peter explains how CP can be used to teach geography, biochemistry, evolution, entomology, politics, computer networking, along with many other fields.
• "Plants through Time", by Rick Walker. "Plants through Time", a poetic evolutionary history of plants, was displayed at Hewlett-Packard Labs for Earth Day 1997.

If you are a teacher using CP in the classroom, please contact Rick Walker at the address below. I'd be happy to put you in touch with other teachers, or to devote some space on this server to distribute your ideas. You also might like to take a look at some links to some CP teaching resources.