Hairy hood:
In this close view of a pitcher hood you can see that the lobes are not at all
tightly folded around the front of the pitcher. Some of the pitchers had more tightly folded leaves, but those were
usually on pitchers that were crowded closely together. Given room to grow, the lobes were spreading.
Arguments that these plants are not really Sarracenia purpurea var. montana wouldn't hold water because
we were smack in the center of the range for these plants, and were far from the more mundane lowland taxa.
Another character supposedly useful to identify Sarracenia purpurea var. montana is that the hairs
on the pitcher hood are relatively short. I'll concede that this seems to be the case. Those hairs do seem to be shorter
than the long hairs more commonly seen on Sarracenia purpurea subsp. venosa. I didn't take the time to
make a statistically significant set of measurements, however.
Here is another view of this cluster of pitchers.
Time was ticking, and we decided it was time to move on. We carefully stacked the bog-walking
boards where we found
them, hydrated at the car, and drove west to a Sarracenia oreophila site that I had visited a few
years previously.
I had no idea what to expect there; being so early in the season I anticipated that all the plants would still only
be rather boring clusters of phyllodia.
