Um... well... north is not the best exposure for CP's, unfortunately. If there was a way of rigging up a cheap fluorescent shoplight over them, then that would work. As to the other scenario, with office fluorescent lighting, is it what would shine on them from the ceiling? If it is, it isn't enough. It's too far away to beneficial. Artificial lighting needs to be ~6" away from the plants. I have a cheap fluorescent shoplite over much of my collection, in our closet, 4" above them. As long as the folks in the office don't mind some CP's at a window sill, would they also tolerate a shoplite?

If that is a viable approach, many, many sundews, butterworts, and bladderworts (with miniature orchid-like flowers) would be suitable. Below is a link to what I had, most at window sills, at the lab in which I used to work. But I had SW, SE, and NW window sills to use.

Here is a link that might be useful: Jimscott's Plants

Well - - it doesn't sound too hopeful without a bit of extra light and humidity. Thanks for the input. I'll see what I can rig up.

The setup I have in a closet was nothing more than driving a nail in the wall on either side and attaching the 6" chains that came with it to the nails. And then I plugged the short plug into an extention cord. Keep us posted!

How about those under-counter fluorescent lights? Don't they stick on the bottoms of shelves? I have even seen some small plant lights that you can attach to walls behind or just above plants to highlight them.

Go to a hardware store and see what's available.

Good luck!

Thanks for the suggestion, Lindaflower. I do have under shelf florescents in my space, but the lady who wants to me to experiment in her office only has the window sill - I may be able to convince her of a florescent lamp...I'm going to try, at any rate. Any suggestions as to where to acquire plants? I looked at Lowe's. Yuck! BTW - I'm in the DFW area, too!

Lowes can have a good variety of CP's and depending up on your timing, can also have them be in decent health. Mine, like your store, has had the same shipment kicking around for several weeks and they are, "yuck". If you catch a new shipment, they will be fine. They also tend to have slightly nore outdoor than indoor plants, but cobra lily's, D. adelae, D. spatulata, an Asian pitcher plant, and P. primulifora. Pictures are below:

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All but the last picture I purchased from Lowes. If you can't find anything realistically available from Lowes, many people purchase plants from online sites, Ebay, as well as from other forum members. ~95% of what I have has come from forum members, once I tapped out Lowes, Home Depot,... I have never bought a plant online. If you cannot find anything or are uncomfortable with buying online, I'm sure that the forum members would help ya out.

GREAT pics, Petiolaris. If you don't mind me asking, HOW do you show pictures within your post? I only know how to inset a link in the post. Thanks in advance.

Thanks. Photobucket offers 3 ways to bring pictures to the various forum formats. The one that this forum uses is the one called 'TAG'. I just copy that one and paste it to the message box.

I was at my Lowe's over the weekend and the plants looked horrible! They were moved away from the windows because of the Christmas stuff and are turning into black mush with fuzzy white pom poms! I have never mail ordered any Cp's txbelle but I know Cobra Plants on the web is popular.

We both live in DFW like you said. Do you live in "D" or "FW"? Send me an email. Click on my profile and there's a link.

If you check out this web site you might find what you need

http://www.bugbitingplants.com

I just bought a plant light from them and it could solve your problem. The light is called The Intelligent Plant Light and is on their front page. Good Growing!

Give this site a try
http://cobraplant.com (Sarracenia Northwest)

I've seen (and have bought)the cubes at Lowes and they can somethimes look pretty scary, cause they dont seem to know how to care for em (or care too know). I did get lucky and got nice looking purple pitcher from them. The plants i get from cobraplant.com are really good quality and good variety. The tropicals are grown in greenhouses and the temperates are grown outdoors (zone 8) and have gone through at least one dormancy period. The plants are express shipped in their pots and come with growing instructions. The website also has care instructions on the site for the different varieties of CPs. Their prices are similiar to what u would pay for the cubes at lowes. Hope thats helpful for ya.

twotut:

That Intelligent Plant Light is just a gimmick from the looks of it. From what I gather, it barely gives off about 550 lumens with a 9 watt florescent compact light. That would be insufficient even for butterworts, much less a Venus Flytrap (they often show pics of big healthy Flytraps under those lights, but I really doubt those lights got those particular plants that healthy). A more cost effective approach is to buy a couple of florescent shop lights for about 6 dollars each and get a cheap Christmas tree timer to hook them up to. Total cost is about 20 dollars or so. Less than half the cost of that woefully inadequate and costly bells and whistles light while giving 12000 lumens over a much wider area.

If what you want is a good light illumination for your plants, I have used 4 fluorescent light bulbs that supposedly conserve energy, the one that the bulb is a coiled glass tube. ItÂs my idea but it works just fine.

I made sure I bought 2 that are called natural light and with the brightness of at least 2000 lumens. Plus 2 coiled light bulbs with actinic blue to make sure to have a good spectrum balance Its works just fine for me. The price for each bulb is around $8.00 dollars each but they last a long time.

I have my plants growing on a bookshelf in an office like environment, cool and with low humidity. My plants which are D. capensis, tokaiensis, madagascariensis, U. reniformis, and including my Nepenthes alata, truncata, ventricosa, plus 3 more purchased at Home Depot and Lowes are doing fine. I just make sure I have their growing media most or wet depending on the species.

So in my opinion, some plants can grow in an office environment. Trick in my experience is the light. I always provide at least 9 hours of light. So you should be succesfull in groing them in the office. And I'll probably try it in my office. Sounds like a pretty good idea.

hunterkiller03:

That setup would work quite well too. Florescent lights of all sorts do conserve energy as they use up less electricity, saving money in the long run on your energy bill. Replace all your house incandescent bulbs with them and watch how much you save. As you indicated, they last for years so the extra cost of buying a few is repaid when you get your first couple of energy bills and note the difference. If you have low light ivys in your house, they will like the difference in spectrum too.