$ 425.00
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Plants are well established in 2" pots and growing in Lechuza Pon. As carlablackiae is a bit fussy when it comes to acclimatization, we have had these plants growing in left than optimal conditions for the past two weeks in case they did sell so they would not freak out when placed in a box. You might notice some of the tiny seedling leaves are yellowing from this process.
Line breeding with carlablackiae has proven to be somewhat frustrating for us because in reality such a tiny percentage of the seedlings ever seem to carry the traits of the parents, yet for some unknown reason this is one plant where absolutely EVERYONE seems to want to see the parents, which really makes me chuckle honestly. If I were to take a wild guess, I'd say the originals were collected from one population which had been cross breeding with themselves for a pretty long time so all the plants irrespective of size, shape, color, leaf size and every other attribute you can think of, still carried the genetic profiles of several plants in the immediate vicinity in the background. We have bred super round onto super round, and got plants with super long leaves, the reverse statement is true for what we got when we tried to breed for elongated leaves! In a nutshell, we just havent found the right plants yet which carry a dominant desirable trait which we can then use for future breeding to obtain some stability.
Some things to note about these plants:
#1 - in our experience, elongated leaves mean nothing! 2 of the best plants we set aside with elongated leaves had the most incredibly long leaves until they flowered for the 3rd or 4th time, and then suddenly the leaves started to get fatter and rounder. One of those plants is now known as "Tezula Goddess"
#2 - Presentation means nothing (WHAT!!!!!!) Presentation seems to be strongly determined by environmental factors. When we first got our plants, after a few months we noticed the leaves were slowly reverting to a flat position which really freaked us out, and it was not just the new leaves, it was the older leaves too! We started asking around and were very surprised to find some people were experiencing the same thing while others looked at us as if we were absolutely nuts! We were even sent photos from a grower who was growing one of the original releases and his leaves had taken it to the extreme, they had not just stopped when they were parallel to the pot, they continued extending down. It was so extreme the plant actually needed to be potted up into a basket as the leaves were hanging below the pot line and were by every definition now pendant! This particular plant to this day remains one of the most beautiful plants we have ever seen with the most gorgeous flower. Crazy right! Well it gets better! Our original plants maintained their leaves nearly hugging the ground for over a year and then all of a sudden, a new leaf came out which was nice and erect, and all the other leaves slowly started raising themselves up. We are still completely baffled by why this happens and do not know what causes it. When we reviewed photos taken of plants in the wild, we were rather surprised, and somewhat relieved to see the leaves on those plants were also very low to the ground on many plants and not perky and erect. One day we will hopefully be able to find out what causes this strange phenomenon, but it is really weird watching your leaves go up and down!
#3 - We have tried to breed to get super big white flowers by using plants with super big white flowers, and we got every possible size shape and color you could imagine. We tried to create a line focusing on the bloom several times but the results were just too erratic. If anyone out there has a carlablackiae that seems to produce offspring with lots of big white flowers, please email us!
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